Create Custom Music on Hold for Cisco UCME
Feb 24th
Here’s one from my personal tip jar. This is well documented on Cisco’s website, but sometimes it’s just nicer to have this type of info in bite-sized portions.
As nice as the canned music on hold files are that come with Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express, sometimes you just want to add that personal touch.
A custom MOH file format must be 8khz 8-bit mono u-Law audio in WAV or AU.
Tools
- Sound editor (I prefer Audacity, as it’s free and does a great job)
- Sound recording (create your own or use your favorite song(s))
Prepare the Sound File
I’m not going to go into how to use Audacity, for that you should check out their well documented website. However, here are some tips related to preparing your sound file for use as a music-on-hold file.
- Adjust your sound levels prior to saving/converting your file, as you can’t adjust audio levels in UCME. Often what sounds great on your computer speakers can be blaring at best or ear-drum shattering at worst playing through the phone system.
- Encoding options:
- Output format: .au or .wav
- Codec: uLaw
- Sample Rate: 8000 or 8khz
- Channels: Mono
When you have your sound file prepared, upload your MOH file via TFTP to the router’s flash file system. I use TFTPD32 for this.
Configuring UCME
Lastly, you’ll need to configure UCME to use the uploaded file for your music on hold.
Configuration Steps:
1. enable
2. configure terminal
3. telephony-service
4. moh filename
5. multicast moh ip-address port port-number [route ip-address-list]
6. exit
7. ephone phone-tag
8. multicast-moh
9. end
Grant Full Access to All Mailboxes in Exchange 2010
Jan 26th
Here’s a little time-saving tip for working with mailboxes in Exchange 2010. Normally if you need full access to another user’s mailbox in Exchange 2007/2010 you would highlight their mailbox in the Exchange Management Console and the choose “Manage Full Access…” from the action pane. You would have to do this individually for each mailbox that you wanted to manage full access permissions for.
Here’s an easier way to grant full access to a user for every mailbox in a mailbox database. Just edit the bracketed fields below and paste the cmdlet in the Exchange Command Shell:
Get-MailboxDatabase -identity “[mailbox database name]” | Add-ADPermission -user [username] -AccessRights GenericAll
Voila! You now have full access to all mailboxes in the selected database. This even applies to new accounts created after you run the cmdlet.
RD Gateway/Web Access Outside the Firewall
Jan 5th
I recently had the opportunity to work with one of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2’s neatest features: Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway) and Remote Desktop Web Access (RD Web Access). If you aren’t familiar with these features, check out a brief summary here.
The setup is fairly straightforward, as outlined here and here. However, I did run into an issue that slowed me down a bit. The solution to this was not documented in the step-by-step guides or on the Microsoft Technet website. If anyone knows otherwise and I’ve overlooked this, as always, please provide the appropriate links in the comments.
Problem: Not able to connect to a Remote Desktop or Remote App program from outside the firewall. Inside the firewall, everything worked like a charm. The network firewall (Cisco router) was configured to allow the appropriate traffic (port 443). Disabling the Windows Server 2008 R2 firewall did not make a difference.
Solution part 1:
Add computer account to domain “IAS and RAS Servers” group
Solution part 2:
You should also be sure to configure the default Remote Desktop Gateway server for RD Web Access. Otherwise you could run into issues with the RD Web Access not knowing which RD Gateway to use (even if both roles are installed on the same server!).
- Open up “IIS Admin” console from the “Administrative Tools” menu.
- Navigate to the default web site and configure the “Application Settings” for “Default Web Site\RDWeb\Pages“.
- Change the following setting:
“DefaultTSGateway” = [fqdn of Internet accessible TS Gateway]
Note: make sure this is also the server name listed on your SSL certificate.
Recover from IOS Armageddon
Dec 24th
Ok, maybe it’s not that extreme, but losing power to a Cisco router or switch, while performing an IOS upgrade, after you’ve deleted your existing IOS can be a headache. While not a disaster, you can plan on spending about an extra 45 minutes or so to recover. Here’s the lowdown:
Summary
You’ll need to upload a new IOS image using the Xmodem or Ymodem protocol, which is way slower than TFTP or other methods (about 50 times slower!).
What You’ll Need
- Cisco console cable
- Terminal emulator w/Xmodem or Ymodem support
- IOS image of choice
Step 1
Configure the router for the fastest connection possible (115kbps) using the “confreg” command, as shown here. Also, configure the speed of the serial port on the computer that you are connecting to the device with to the same speed.
Step 2
Upload image using a terminal emulator with support for Xmodem or Ymodem. If you’re using Windows XP, you can use hyperterminal in combination with telnet. I prefer to use “SecureCRT“, but if anyone has any other recommendations, don’t be shy to comment. Be prepared for this process to take up to an hour for an 15 MB IOS image. If you’re looking at a couple of hours for the same file size, most likely you don’t have your transfer or serial port speed set correctly (see step 1).
Step 3
Reload router using uploaded IOS image. Don’t forget to change the speed settings on the network device and computer back to the default (9600kbps).