Monday 18 February 2013

Communications Manager Tools Part 2

Troubleshooting using SDI/SDL traces from CUCM is a pain, in part because the tool within RTMT for doing this is pretty lame. Cisco do make the Voice Log Translator, which tidies up the presentation of traces & provides explanations of many of the fields, very useful! Unfortunately it's not been updated since 2010 & when I tried using it with CUCM 9.1 recently it didn't seem to understand many of the traces. Fortunately there are a couple of alternative tools for wrangling with traces, both made by Cisco employees: TranslatorX & Triple Combo.

Also, don't forget to give the tools from Communications Manager Tools Part 1 a go.

Friday 15 February 2013

ATA 186 & 187 2nd FXS Port

On the now discontinued ATA 186 & the current ATA 187, to use the 2nd FXS port you have to create another device, take the MAC address & tack 01 on the end & remove the first 2 digits. For example 54781A1D7D43 becomes 781A1D7D4301.

Friday 1 February 2013

Jabber Video for Telepresence & AnyConnect VPNs

I recently spent some time troubleshooting a customer's video call quality issues when their staff working from home on an AnyConnect VPN make video calls using Jabber Video for Telepresence. The symptoms include low resolution being used & frequent periods of high packet loss (upto 70%) reported by Jabber Video, despite fast Internet connections in use at both ends. After much head scratching it turns out Jabber Video doesn't get on with SSL VPNs, there's an official notice from Cisco on the matter here. My testing shows that both IPsec & L2TP/IPsec VPNs don't suffer from this problem.