Unity Express Upgrade Failure

Hit an odd error when attempting to upgrade Unity Express 8.5.1 to 8.6.7 where it downloaded part of the files & choked with the error message "Error: Required Subsystem ID e2497725-368d-48b5-a7d5-7f87d889a608 was not found either on Installed or Candidate list.". There's a known bug (CSCtd56585) that causes this error, but Cisco's documentation says the conditions are:

1) Cisco Unity Express was shipped from Cisco with version 7.0.1 or later

2) One of the following upgrades is done

– 7.0.x to 7.1.

– 7.0.x to 8.0.

– 7.1.x to 8.0.x

Given that this was CUE 8.5.1 running on an SRE, it doesn't match the criteria. Fortunately the workaround does still work - use the CUE CLI command software uninstall uid-list 26bd663c-3e5a-43d9-a6c3-5441ce44941b & once it has finished rebooting you can proceed the with the upgrade.

Unable to Transfer Calls on 7900 Series Phones

Recently encountered an issue in 7900 series phones where transferring a call when using a headset doesn't work, this is a confirmed bug in firmwares 9.3(1) SR4 & 9.3(1) SR4.1, full details here. The symptoms are:

• When a user attempts to transfer a call, the original call is placed on hold, but the user is not able to dial the transfer destination.
• When a user already has an active call on their phone, they are unable to answer a new incoming call. The original call is placed on hold, and the new call is simply disconnected.

Unfortunately every device pack for CUCM since around December 2013 includes affected firmware, the solution is to roll back to an older firmware or request the engineering special firmware from TAC.

Attendant Console Installation Problems

Installing the Attendant Console usually involves me tripping over one or more of the following problems...

Remote Desktop
The Cisco TAPI driver installation fails to work properly if you're using remote desktop to connect to the AC server. Use VNC, physical or  VM console access to do the installation.

TAPI Driver Configuration Failure
Sometimes despite using VNC or physical access to do the installation, the Cisco TAPI driver fails to be configured correctly. If you open the Control Panel "Phone and Modem" applet & select the Advanced tab there should be "CiscoTSP001.tsp" or similarly named present in the list of Providers. If it's not present you need to click Add & select it from the list, if it's not in this list manually install the Cisco TAPI driver. If you select "CiscoTSP001.tsp", click Configure & none of the settings inputted during the Attendant Console installation are actually present, you'll need to enter them again into the various tabs. If the Timer Settings on the Advanced tab are absent, then use the following:

Timer	Value
Synchronous Message Timeout	15 seconds
Requested Heartbeat Interval	30 seconds
Connect Retry Interval	30 seconds
Provider Open Completed Timeout	50 seconds

Error -206 When Synchronising to Cisco Unified Communications Manager
The device synchronisation will fail with the following error message:

Error Code: -206
Error Description: The specified table (owneruserid) is not in the database.

This error occurs if your template device has a Subscribe CSS configured, the Cisco AC troubleshooting guide says "To prevent this error, edit the Phone Template Configuration to include an Owner User ID under the Device Information. We recommend that you use the Application User ID allocated for Cisco Unified Attendant Console Advanced for the Owner User ID". However this is incorrect as it isn't possible to assign an Application User as the owner of a phone, therefore the solution is either to have no Subscribe CSS configured or assign an End User (not Anonymous).

CTI Devices Not Registering
If everything looks OK (e.g. application user group membership & device association) but the CTI devices refuse to register, first make sure the Common Device Profile they're using has only IPv4 enabled. Currently enabling IPv6 prevents the AC from controlling the CTI devices.

Sometimes it's also necessary to un-install & then re-install the TAPI driver, you can download the correct version from CUCM under Application > Plugins > Cisco TAPI Driver. See the previous note about TAPI driver configuration.

For any other issues refer to the latest CUAC Advanced Troubleshooting Guide.

Jabber for Windows/Mac With Telephone Number as Username

Jabber for Windows & Mac assumes that the sAMAccountName & userPrincipalName in Active Directory provide the correct username. However if in CUCM you're using the telephoneNumber or ipPhone field as the username (which I've seen many times!) Jabber won't work properly. When you view a contact in Jabber the IM address will show the incorrect username, for example dave@example.com instead of 4321@example.com.
In the days of CUPC you could edit the LDAP attribute mappings in the CUPS GUI, but for Jabber you have to create an XML file to configure the attribute mappings. Assuming you're using the telephoneNumber field as the username, create a file in UTF-8 encoded text file named jabber-config.xml containing the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<config version="1.0">
 <Directory>
   <UserAccountName>telephoneNumber</UserAccountName>
   <DomainName>telephoneNumber</DomainName>
 </Directory>
</config>

Upload this file to all your TFTP servers & restart the TFTP service on them. Now when Jabber loads it will download this file & assign the correct LDAP attribute mappings.
There's a bunch of other settings for Jabber that you can only configure via an XML file, fortunately Cisco have released a tool to help automate this process.

Useful Debugs

There's a multitude of debugs on Cisco routers, below are some that I frequently find useful for VoIP troubleshooting:

Command	Purpose
debug ccsip messages	Shows the SIP messages being sent & received
debug gatekeeper call 5	Shows gatekeeper call processing, including bandwidth requests
debug gatekeeper main 5	Shows gatekeeper address resolution, including zone/prefix matching
debug h225 asn1	Shows H225 messages being sent & received
debug isdn q931	Shows ISDN Q931 messages, including calling & called number
debug ras	Shows summary of H225 RAS messages being sent & received
debug voice ccapi individual 2	Shows a summary of call setup messages regardless of protocol, including calling & called number
debug voip ipipgw	Shows the CUBE processing, such as when it needs to invoke a transcoder

Don’t forget to add voice iec syslog to your configuration too, this enables a lot of useful information to be logged.

UCCX Demo Licence

If you're building a lab, UCCX won't let you proceed through the initial set up without a valid licence file. Fortunately Cisco allow you to use a 30 day demo licence for any Standard, Enhanced or Premium, these are located in the DemoLicense folder on the install DVD. However if you don't have an install DVD or ISO to hand there is another way - you can download a UCCX update patch, open it with a tool like 7-Zip & extract the relevant demo licence file from it. Just remember that the licences are tied to the major UCCX version, so a UCCX 8.x install requires a UCCX 8.x licence file.

Troubleshooting Database Replication

Whilst wrangling with a particularly thorny database replication failure I found an in depth Cisco troubleshooting guide to database replication. Well worth a read if dealing with issues that utils dbreplication repair all doesn't fix.