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If you work on Cisco IPT environments, you have probably ran into a situation where you wanted to make a call through a gateway to test the PSTN connectivity, test translation-profiles or as a process of elimination, you wanted to eliminate the CUCM cluster.  The Xlite SIP softphone is a great tool for such tests. You can make calls through an IOS gateway without making any new configuration changes to the gateway itself or to the CUCM cluster.

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Before getting started with this little tip, I just wanted to drop a short note to you all to let you know that James and I have not abandoned the blog. We have just taken an “unannounced” three month vacation. Or you could say that “life happened” to us both and three months slipped by.

I have been trying to find the time to put together something really impressive after being out for so long, but I have decided it is better to just get back to work. As a way of getting back into the swing of things, I thought I would do a small writeup on an IOS feature that I recently stumbled across. I have known for a while that it is possible to pass commands between Linux machines via ssh by simply adding a command to the end of the ssh command string. I recently tried it on a router and to my surprise … it worked. Cool!

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In this tutorial, you will learn a couple ways to connect a physical router to your home phone line as part of your “virtual voice lab “.  An all virtual voice lab would be ideal. However, real hardware is necessary for a more complete voice lab. I will be using a 2611XM for my home lab, but you can use just about any Cisco router with a couple fxs and fxo ports.

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Here at Blindhog.net, we have issued tutorials for connecting Windows or Linux to a physical network using gns3, but apparently, there is a little difference for MacOSX.  I recently received an email from one of our readers, Ivan Pletenev. Ivan describes how to connect GNS3 to internet through wifi-interface in MacOSX. You will find his writeup below. Thanks Ivan!

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I apologize for the delay in posting the next tutorial in the virtual voice lab but I ran into a problem communicating from the HQ router to the host Ubuntu server. I thought I was able to communicate from the HQ router to the host during the Headquarters build tutorial….but I was wrong.

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This is the Frame-Relay WAN section of the Virtual Voice Lab. In this tutorial, you will learn how to connect Branch 1 and Branch 2 routers to the Headquarters router using frame-relay PVCs.
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Is it possible to build a voice lab without actual hardware? The answer is yes and no. You can build a very good lab using GNS3 and VMWare but it is not possible to build a complete lab. The underlying emulation engine for GNS3 (dynamips) does not support digital signal processors (dsps) or voice cards.

Over the next few months, I will show you how to build a very good lab without any hardware. If you want a more complete lab, you will need to obtain at least one router with dsps and voice cards. I have a 2611XM router with DSPs, a vic-2fxs card, a vic-2fxo card and an ATA-186.

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I was browsing videos on brainbump.net last Friday and noticed a different take on a tutorial I did regarding automatic configuration backups with the ‘archive’ command.  While watching the video, I learned a new trick.  The file name in the ‘path’ command may contain two different variables.

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This is part two of my gns3 switching tutorial series. In part 1, you learned how to use a 16 port network module (NM-16ESW) to simulate many features of a Cisco switch. In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure vlans on the switch and how to route between vlans with a ‘router on a stick’ configuration.

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In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a Cisco switching lab … even though GNS3 cannot emulate a Cisco switch. I will show you how to use an NM-16ESW network module in a 3640 router to emulate a switching environment.

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