Three More Chapters Until Test Retake

I'm starting to make some head way through the last book I picked up for CVoice. I'm hoping to have the last 3 chapters finished in another 6 weeks, it all depends on how busy I get at my gig. Right now I'm working my way through the H.323 Gatekeeper and CUBE chapter. Followed by the oh so famous QoS chapters. Looks like I won't be able to rent any lab time through INE for the entire month of July due to book camp weeks. That's alright I'm already planning and designing my new and improved lab, I plan on even getting a comm rack this time around!

INE Labs and a Quick MGCP Tip

Slowly but surely I'm making through the Sybex CVOICE book, I'm about 65 percent of the way the through. I've been going through the hands on labs in the book as well, utilizing the INE rack rentals since I'm unable to access real equipment at the moment. I'm not going to lie, just figuring out how to connect to their labs have been difficult...for me. I tried the VPNless method and the Cisco VPN client methods so far. Using the VPNless method I couldn't connect to a lot of the equipment for whatever reason. When using the Cisco VPN client, it seemed to work a lot better but I couldn't access anything else outside of the the lab rack.

I'm sure this has more to do with me than anything else to be honest with myself. The racks are designed for people prepping for CCIE so in the back of mind I feel as though my comprehension of the technology itself is preventing me to wrap my head around on how to correctly connect to their equipment. I may be wrong though, at least I'm able to accomplish what I need so far. I believe over time I'll become more familiar on how to properly connect to everything. If not I'm not afraid to ask for help.

MGCP TIP:

I'm sure most of you know this, in order for MGCP to work correctly and pull the XML file from CUCM, the name on the voice gateway and the CUCM must have the same exact name!

Well it was bound to happen but I'm finally broken in at my new job and made my first mistake that caused downtime for a few sites. I was tasked with installing a template on all of our gateways which included giving them our domain name.

The official syntax for this is ip domain-name domainname; the use of this command changes the name of the Cisco device. So if your device host name is called Gateway and you add the domain name to the device i.e. ip domain-name contoso.com, the official name for the device is now Gateway.contoso.com. Even though the device considers Gateway.contoso.com to be its name, the host name will still appear as just Gateway when you're staring at the CLI.

Unless you changed the name to Gateway.contoso.com on CUCM as well, it will not know how to reach this device. The trickiest part about this is that it doesn't rear it's head right away, Our gateways didn't use the new name until exactly 12:00 AM the following Saturday after I gave them their new domain info. Watch out for this!