When I got home on Friday evening, freshly excited about the class, I grabbed the CUCM 7 media and fired up a new fusion VM. Settings are as follows:

1. If you have the iso, click Continue without disc and then select the disc image, otherwise insert the CUCM7 installation disc
2. The system will detect RHEL4 which is correct, press continue to use the disc, then continue again at the OS selection screen
3. Uncheck Use Easy Install (don’t we all wish), click continue
4. Click Customize Settings
   1. Sharing: Disabled
   2. Applications: Menu Enabled (don’t think this matters)
   3. Processors & RAM: 2 CPU 2048 RAM (this does matter)
   4. Display: 3D disabled (doubt it matters)
   5. Printers: Enabled, match default (doesn’t matter)
   6. Autoprotect: Disabled (doesn’t matter)
   7. Network: NAT (more on this later)
   8. Hard Disks: IDE Disk, 80GB, uncheck Pre-allocate disk space, check split into 2GB files (80GB is necessary, I think IDE is)
   9. Everything else, defaults
5. Start it up
6. Media Check: Your choice, I choose No and all was fine
7. vmware Found screen: Agree (a big thanks to Cisco for allowing this, they didn’t have to)
8. Product Deployment Selection: Cisco Unified Communications Manager – OK
9. Proceed with Install: Yes
10. Platform Installation Wizard: Proceed
11. Apply Patch: No (haven’t tried this yet)
12. Import Windows Data: No
13. Basic Install: Continue
14. Timezone Configuration: America/Denver for me
15. Auto Negotiation Configuration: Yes
16. MTU Configuration: No
17. DHCP: No
18. Static Network Configuration – This is where things get a little complicated. Start a terminal session and type ifconfig. Note the IP address for vmnet8. Mine was 192.168.223.1. This is the NAT network for Fusion. IP addresses .3-.127 are statically assignable. Thanks to Michael McLaughlin for this information. Note that if you do not setup the network correctly, the system will not install and will die with a Security configuration failed (1) error.
    
    1. Hostname: FusionCCM7
    2. IP Address: 192.168.x.3 where x is the third octet of the IP address you discovered in step 18
    3. IP Mask: 255.255.255.0
    4. GW Address: 192.168.x.2 where x is the third octet of the IP address you discovered in step 18
    5. Press OK
19. DNS Client Configuration: Yes
    1. Primary DNS: 192.168.x.2 where x is the third octet of the IP address you discovered in step 18
    2. Secondary DNS: blank
    3. Domain: cucm.local
20. Administration Login Configuration
    1. Administrator ID: ccmadmin
    2. Password: c123sco (a mix of letters and numbers is required)
    3. Confirm Password: c123sco
21. Certificate Information – Your locale information
22. First Node Configuration: Yes
23. Network Time Protocol Client Configuration: Yes
    1. NTP Server 1: 64.90.182.55
24. Database Access Security Configuration
    1. Security Password: c123sco
    2. Confirm Security Password: c123sco
25. SMTP Host Configuration: No
26. Application User Configuration
    1. Application User Username: ccmadmin
    2. Application User Password: c123sco
    3. Confirm Application User Password: c123sco
27. Platform Configuration Complete: OK

It took me about an hour for the full install and then I had my system up and running. Enjoy!

What would you do?

What would businesses do?

What would the world do?

Those who already had all the phone numbers they need would be OK, but in the back of their mind, they would wonder what to do if they needed just 1 more. There has to be a single phone number available, right? Well, of course for enough money there would be, after-all, people would be willing to give up their phone numbers or maybe they had a few stashed that they weren’t using. Maybe they saw this phone number shortage coming and ordered a whole bunch for a rainy day or to scalp on eBay later on?

There is good and bad news to this example. We aren’t out of phone numbers just yet but we are dangerously low on public IP addresses. Many analysts agree that we have about 3 years left and we will be completely tapped out, world wide. You can even check out the updated statistics courtesy of Stephan Lagerholm at IPv4Depletion.

I was convinced before my last two days at the Rocky Mountain IPv6 Summit that IPv6 was a tactic invented by Cisco to separate the boys and girls from the men and women when it came to certification. It was that last chapter in the book and those 10 questions on the exam that killed all but the most dedicated certification pursuers. There was no actual need for IPv6, it was just a myth that we are running out of public addresses. Nope, it’s true.

Luckily for all of us the Internet Engineering Task Force was aware of this problem many years ago and created a better IP protocol with a lot more addresses. Not just enough to cover the short term but enough to cover a very long time. They really aimed high on how many addresses they were going to put out this time. IPv6 provides more addresses in cyberspace than there are grains of sand on the world’s beaches. If you like numbers, it provides 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. I think we will be ok.

Now it’s just up to the network engineers of the world to get us there. Remember that a lot of us are behind the decision makers who need a push from you. I know it’s not something you think of much but next time you buy a networked device, ask if it’s IPv6 compliant. Give your internet service provider a call and ask them if you can have IPv6 service. Until the consumers push, this is going to be hard for us to do. If the decision makers and pocket-book-holders don’t make it a priority, we will have to throw it all together in a time-crunched-panic when they do run out… and everyone knows how well our computing efforts go when we are in a hurry.

If you want to dig in even more, check out the presentations and white-papers I saw live at the summit.