Cisco Unified Communication Manager 7 (CUCM7) on VMWare Fusion 3.0 for Mac

I know, catchy title isn't it. Last week I finished Administering Cisco Unified Communication Manager 7 & Unity Connection class in order to help with my overall understanding of our telecom infrastructure at the school district. It was a great class and really filled in the fundamentals I was missing. More importantly, on one of the labs, I noticed a message that CUCM was running under VM. I did some more research and Cisco actually allows this!

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:

Asterisk Still Rocks

A few days ago I heard a knock at the door and went to see who it was. I usually just don't open the door for people I don't know but the kid looked so excited for someone to open it that I did. He was offering Comcast IP phone service for $20 a month and offered to discount my Comcast High Speed Internet $10 a month if I signed up. Telephone service for $10/mo! I had to break the news to him that I had that price beat.

"How could that be?", he asked.

"Well, Asterisk".

Call forwarding with Asterisk

This is more a note for myself to try later and then post my results:

 http://blog.carrel.org/2005/07/calling-features-with-asterisk.html

Whim Discovery: My Experience with Asterisk

It all started at Barnes and Noble in Downtown Denver. It was our anniversary weekend and one of the things we like to do downtown is hit the bookstore and enjoy quiet reading time. I was looking for a book on SELinux which I just couldn’t find in the Linux section. I came across another O’Reilly book called Asterisk: The Future of Telephony. I enjoyed a sunny afternoon reading through the book next to my wife. I only made it a few chapters in but I was hooked. I had just completed a MythTV project and was saving dough on TV already, why not the phone too! After we were done, I put the book back but the fire had already been started.

Callvantage QoS

I finally got around to fixing the QoS problem with my Callvantage VoIP setup. After determining about 3 months ago that my Callvantage box was dropping packets and causing general outbound havok on my system, I decided to move it inside my network behind my trusty linux firewall/router/mailserver/gameserver box. The unfortunate side effect was that I lost the Quality of Service capabilities. This caused a serious delay in voice transmission and sometimes even stuttering while I was talking on the phone. I usually just accepted it until my friend got his new Actiontec router and it handled VoIP QoS automatically. Now if Actiontec can do it, I know my outdated Redhat 7.3 install should be able to.

AT&T Came Through

I was not suprised to see a package on my doorstep on Christmas Eve with all of the last minute presents coming through but I when I saw the label I was amazed. FexEx overnight from AT&T. Here it was, the MTA I begged for but was told I couldn't have. I took it out of the box quickly noticing the prepaid UPS return label and plugged it in down stairs. After restoring the config and re-registering it with Callvantage, a quick ring-back confirmed it was up. I picked up the receiver and dialed, it rang, no whine. There is still a slight hiss like a data connection noise in the background but much more acceptable. I am pleased to now officially have successfully transferred from Vonage to AT&T. It only took 2 months, about 35 phone calls and at least 1" of my hairline to complete.

No More Vonage

I had the joy of cancelling my Vonage account yesterday. Not suprisingly, they gave me a very hard time and charged me $41.99 per line for the cancellation. They are kind enough to refund one of the cancellation fees as soon as I return the router but the customer service guy I talked to said that the automated system usually doesn't work so he put a note on my account. All in all, they owe me almost $200 in credits for all the screw ups. I won't find out how much of that I get until the MTA gets back to them. I can't wait to finally be done with all of this. Merry Christmas Eve day to everybody!

Callvantage Tech Support - Miserable

Nick was kind enough to come over and bring his Callvantage TA box over for testing to make sure the whining noise went away and sure enough, it did! Now we have isolated the problem as a defective TA. I called Callvantage to tell them the good news and they said that they want him to bring it back and connect it up and call in so they can hear the difference. Are you kidding me? They don't believe me and must think that I just want an extra TA or something. My call was actually answered in 6 minutes this time but took 30 minutes of instant messaging between the tier 1 support person and the escalations departmet to determine that my diagnosis wasn't good enough for them to ship a new adapter. I must now wait until my ticket is worked in the queue before I will get this resolved. 48-hours left until porting is complete. Maybe I should cancel before then. We will see.

Cancelled Vonage

Qwest arrived on time today to setup the phone line. I told them that it had already been done since I am handy with telcom wiring but he wanted to connect his Harris tester up and make sure the link was good. We chatted about Vonage and I told him about the hell I went through with them. He laughed and had heard it before. I guess sometimes newer technology isn't necessarily better. My DirectTiVo is about as happy as could be, it can finally dial up after being out-of-communication with the mothership (DirectTV) for almost 4 months now. I am looking forward to being able to send faxes as well.

The Vonage Saga is Ending

The last straw today. I came back from my birthday lunch and went into my office to find my message light not blinking for the first time in several weeks. I thought this was odd as my Nortel Vista 350 (Qwest Home Receptionist) showed 4 new callers. I dialed into my voicemail and was informed that there were no new messages. I then checked my email and strangely, it said I had 2 new messages. I then logged into the web site and sure enough, I did. Dialed back in, nothing. Hmmm. So I called Vonage and after 35 minutes was told that the issue was known and had been reported but not updated on the web site yet. This is it folks, I can't take it anymore. I have officially decided that after 6 months of my voice mail indicator not turning off, choppy quality, long hold times, phone echo and every service outage imaginable as well as terrible customer service that I am done with Vonage.

I set Melissa's line back up with Qwest for $25/mo with a waived activation fee for returning from a competitor and decided I would give AT&T Callvantage a try for my business line. I do a lot of long distance so this would be a good cost savings. However, this time, at the first sign of crappy quality, I am leaving this VoIP ship and going back to a good ol' "TiVo-can-dial-up-I-can-send-faxes-works-when-internet-is-down" hardwired phone line. Also luckily for me, Vonage was so incompetent that they never transferred my service fully away from Qwest so porting was easy this time with my line. I look forward to receiving my MTA and calling Vonage and telling them to get lost in the next week. Stay tuned and I will let you know how it goes.

The Vonage Saga

Tried Vonage out about 6 months ago, not working so great these days. I am doing webex demo's and the since there is no bandwidth shaping, my voice quality is dying out when I send alot of data out (screen updates during demos). I ordered AT&T Callvantage since Nick recommended it and the box can sit outside the firewall without hanging (like the Vonage MTA) and does traffic shaping to guarantee bandwidth for the voice portion. I tried a tc script from http://www.vonage-forum.com/ftopic1104.html to see if that would resolve the problem but it continues to be a problem. Unfortunately AT&T only supports single line so the business line will have to stay on Vonage until they iron out that issue. Vonage also forgot to cancel my line with Qwest so they have been charging me $30/mo since I switched for basically nothing but a forwarding line. I may be getting a refund for these costs from Vonage according to an email I got today:

Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting Vonage.

In responses to your question, currently we are working on your request. Once the transfer has been completed you will be issued credit for the time lost after the 20 business days.

Please let us know if we may be of any further assistance.

Sincerely
Mark
www.vonage.com
1-VONAGE-HELP

Keeping my fingers crossed.

Skype with Dave

Working with Dave on Skype today. Seems that the Mac OS X client isn't working quite correctly. It seems that Skype out works fine but we are getting errors Skype to Skype (OS X-> WinXP clients). Nothing on the basic NG search helps. I will keep looking.