blindhog.net

This evening I attended a VLecture on “troubleshooting on the CCIE Voice Lab”. Class was instructed by Vik Malhi of IPexpert and was very informative. Vik went over some of the common issues that candidates run into as well as ways to troubleshoot those issues.

(more…)

This past weekend began working through workbook Vol 1 and was able to get a lot of good studying in. Section one is Basic Campus Design. Most of the tasks asked were things I have worked on over the past several months and really have no issues with. Configuring proper vlans, dot1q trunks, Microsoft DHCP, IOS DHCP, NTP on routers, switches, and callmanagers, auto-register phones to callamanager, and register CME phones. I was able to complete all required tasks in a fairly quick amount of time.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

A fast and easy way to test your SRST configuration without taking down the WAN interface, is to add a static route to null 0 for any ip packets coming from the network the Callmanagers are on.

(more…)

When I arrived home from work last Thursday, I was excited to see that my IPexpert Blended Learning Solution package had arrived! Eager to take a look,

(more…)

First, I would like to say thank you Josh for the introduction and for giving me the opportunity to write and share my experiences with all of the Blindhog readers as I prepare for the CCIE Voice Lab Exam.  I have always been a fan of Blindhog and am very excited about being able to contribute! (more…)

A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to win a Blended learning solution for the CCIE Voice track from IPExpert on twitter. I am not currently studying for my CCIE, so I traded it to a good friend in return for blog posts about his experience.

(more…)

After releasing the video tutorial for installing Call Manager 5/6 in VMWare, I received a comment asking how to change the MAC address on the Virtual server. The same person, (DrM) later posted another comment confirming that he had actually changed the address in the Linux OS. I had tried changing the MAC in VMWare with version 5.x but eventually gave up. This tutorial will show you how to change the MAC address in order to duplicate a production environment within VMWare. Without changing the MAC address, it is not possible to completely replicate your CUCM environment in a test lab because the license files are attached to the MAC address.

(more…)

When Cisco first announced the Unified Communication Server (CallManager) would be based on Linux, my first question was “How much of the system would be available to users?”

I think it is great that Cisco does not require Engineers to understand the underlying system CallManager is built on, but some of us are curious. This tutorial will show you how to create a user on a CUCM 5/6 server with shell access and root privileges.

(more…)

One of my customer’s recently started having problems receiving inbound calls although outbound calls worked just fine. Long story short, one of the dsp’s needed to be reset. When I issued the ’show voice dsp detailed’ command, the dspware version displayed all zero’s. After reseting the dsp, calls started working again.

(more…)