Monday, February 27, 2012

Configured Gatekeeper's for the First Time


I finally did something that I was dreading to do for a long time...configure a H.323 Gatekeeper. It wasn't to bad but I will need to lab it again before the test I'm sure. There's just a slew of commands to remember to get everything up and working properly between the endpoint and gatekeeper. Even the instructor in VOD I was following along with was having issues getting everything up and running. He spent about 25 minutes troubleshooting what turned out to be a codec mismatch issue between dial-peers on two different gateways lol.

I'm having this weird intermittent call issue with my gatekeeper and phones though, I wonder if it has something to do with the voice-class codec I have configured but I may be wrong.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Always Troubleshoot the Obvious

I wasted 90 minutes in today's lab troubleshooting an issue that the IOS told me might cause the issue to begin with. I upgraded my 2821 lab routes to a newer IOS 15 version so that I can lab some Gatekeeper scenarios. I knew about this problem in the past but by default, the newer IOS versions (at least voice specific) enables a configuration to prevent Toll-Fraud. It's called ip address trust authenticate which requires that all IP addresses that attempt to place calls to a gateway be added to a list that allows the call to be place.

Now while I knew about this I figured it wasn't enabled since I already had configured my router and looking in my running-config this command was no where to be found. I went ahead and issued the no ip address trust authenticate command under the voice service voip configuration and sure enough I could place H.323 calls again.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Prepping Hardware and Software for CIPT1


While I'm preparing to schedule my test for CVoice and hoping for a first time pass; I'm also getting my ESXi server ready for CIPT1. I already have the domain controller installed along with the CUCM 8.5 Publisher server. I'm hoping that I have enough time today to get the CUCM Subscriber started. I will say that it's very tricky getting CUCM install up and going and it's quick to error out if your system doesn't meet it's "hardware requirements"; at least in VMware.

I used the following template settings to get this to work:

Linux Red Hat (32-bit)
1 Virtual Processor
2 GB RAM
80 GB Hard drive (SAS 0:0)

I believe it's picky about both the OS settings and the hard drive settings the most. Once the Publisher was up and running I took a snapshot, shut her down, decreased the memory to 1 GB and booted her back up. Cisco gave an error message about them not being responsible for me not using the recommended equipment but it booted right up!

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Download My Mnemosyne Flash Cards for CVoice

I uploaded my Mnemosyne Flash Cards for CVoice on the infamous techexams.net forum. You can grab it here if you're interested:

Shawn's CVoice Mnemosyne's

As mentioned you'll have to rename the PDF extension to XML and then import it into the Mnemosyne program in order for this to work.