Cisco
Music On Hold Streaming from an FXO port on CME 8.8
Here’s another CME feature that did not work quite as expected when reading the documentation. As with the conference bridge, I read along and followed the documentation from Cisco for “Configuring Music on Hold from a Live Feed” (the link is below) and the feature was still not working. When placed on hold, all callers heard was the default Cisco MOH audio file. This showed that the fall back portion of the config was working fine but overall something was missing.
“http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucme/admin/configuration/guide/cmemoh.html#wp1010511
According to Cisco all that is required is a cable to connect to your live feed device, a fxo or e&m port, a dial-peer and an ephone-dn.
The cable we made on our own out of a bit of cat5, a RJ11 head and male to mail 3.5mm audio cable. Continue reading →
Configuring a conference bridge in Cisco CME
I recently ran into an issue configuring a conference bridge for a client. What makes this particular problem worth sharing is that I found the documentation provided by Cisco on this issue to be a little confusing and a little unhelpful.
The initial document I used to try to configure this issue can be found here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucme/admin/configuration/guide/cmeconf.html#wp1021179.
In particular what confused me were the differences in step 5 of “Configuring SCCP for Cisco Unified CME” and step 3 of “Associating Cisco Unified CME with a DSP Farm Profile.” I have included the full configuration example of both of these sections below.
Using Cisco 8945 IP phones with CME
We just finished testing the Cisco 8945 IP phone with CME using SCCP and it worked great. Point to point video works flawlessly. A few things to note in setting up these phones:
- Make sure you add the “video” command under telephony-service as well as under the ephone.
- We found that we could not call out our PRI with these phones once video was enabled. We had to add “bearer-cap Speech” under the voice-port to force speech only out the PRI. (The phones were trying to advertise video capabilities out the PRI and our service provider didn’t like that!)
- Although the phones are capable of sending and receiving 640×480 (VGA) video we were noticing that the max we were getting was 325×288 (CIF) resolution. We found that VT Advantage (which is what CME uses) maxes out at CIF resolution per this document.
Continue reading →
CME 8.8 upgrade and Exchange UM voicemail problem
We recently upgraded to the new Cisco CallManager Express (CME) version 8.8 so that we could try out the new 8945 phones for point to point video. Immediately after the upgrade Exchange no longer answered calls to voicemail or auto-attendants and instead gave us a busy signal. In reviewing the Exchange logs I found the following error:
Event ID: 1021
Source: MSExchange Unified Messaging
Task Category: UMCoreThe Unified Messaging server rejected an incoming call with the ID “2ACCC6EF-E2F911E0-9286A0ED-1857E3E@10.1.1.22“. Reason: “The Unified Messaging server received “INVITE” request with an invalid SIP header “USER-AGENT” with value “”.”
MWI with Exchange 2010 and Cisco Unified Communication Manager 7
An exciting feature of Exchange 2010 is its support for message waiting indicators (MWI). While this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, one of the biggest complaints about Exchange 2007 was its lack of MWI support. Even though Exchange Unified Messaging is able to send voicemails to an email address, most users are accustomed to the phone notifying them when they have new voicemail.
Even more exciting were the reports that MWI with Exchange 2010 and Cisco CallManager 7 just worked out of the box without extra configuration. Many articles I read spoke of the ease of configuration at getting this feature enabled. This, however, was not the case in our lab. As it turns out, some of the default settings for SIP trunks in CCM 7 will cause problems with MWI.
Configure QoS for VPN Tunnel on Cisco Router
Class Maps are referenced by Policy Maps, which are then applied to the external interface. VPN traffic is "pre-classified" before entering the external interface. The example below is based on 512 kbps bandwidth available for upload traffic.
Search Cisco NetPro forums from your browser
The Cisco NetPro forum is an excellent resource when searching for answers to Cisco specific issues. To my knowledge Google doesn’t index these forums, but Cisco made a browser plug-in that adds a NetPro forum search option to your browser’s existing search bar. http://www.cisco.com/web/tsweb/searchplugins/plugin_homepage.html#
Cisco Unified Communications Manager Handset Workaround
One of my favorite things about my job is working with Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager (CUCM). It’s so robust and complex that there always seems to be something new to learn. Last week I ran into a couple of interesting issues that I thought I’d share with you.
The first is an issue for which I’ve been trying to find a solution for several weeks. One of our clients was experiencing issues with external auto-attendants recognizing the DTMF tones their phones were sending. What made this issue particularly strange is that if the user was on speaker phone they were able to get the remote AA to respond to the DTMF tones without issue. Continue reading →