The Silo Chronicles
The not so exciting adventures of a Network Engineer

This little feature keeps being brought up around my office. It seems that service providers are finally getting the word out about their new SIP trunk offerings. These offerings are starting to get fairly aggressive which is starting to make companies think about ditching their PSTN services and opt for these more cost effective solutions.

For instance if a company has 20 PRIs across their entire company the chances that they are using 460 phone lines at a single time are fairly low. Add extra services that allow you to re-point DIDs to different PRIs in DR situations and you have a fairly large phone bill. With the SIP offerings I have seen they are allowing a concurrent usage model along with free DR secondary termination points. This way if you only use 200 lines at max concurrently across your entire location you can simply pay a flat fee for 200 talk paths no matter where they terminate. Another added benefit of this is allowing a company with no foot print to order telephone numbers from various local exchanges.

All in all it makes for a very business proposition to look at leaving traditional services for these new SIP offerings. Which results in the many conversations I seem to have having about this lately. Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance implement this yet, give me a few weeks, but one of the things I keep seeing brought up with some confusion is what Feature Set is required. Some Service Providers say Advanced IP Services, some Cisco documentation says Advanced Enterprise and yet the Configuration tool doesn’t complain with just SP Services. After digging up an ordering guide I found the following.

CUBE features are broken down into four categories:

• Basic voice
• Voice security
• Gatekeeper
• Lawful intercept

What Feature Set you need depends on which of these you wish to perform. From what I have been reading most features that are currently provided by Service Providers anything from IP VOICE to SP SERVICES (On 2800/3800 Platforms) will be fine, that is considered Basic Voice. If you want security you will need to push up to Advanced IP Services. If you want Gatekeeper or Lawful Intercept the feature sets start getting more complicated.

If you haven’t thought about taking advantage of CUBE and SIP Trunks you really should talk to your Service Providers.

With the release of 8.0(4) the ASA now supports a nifty new feature called Phone Proxy. The concept behind this little feature is that now an IP Phone can register to the ASA which will proxy the communications to CallManager/CallManager Express. This allows the deployment of IP Phones without VPN tunnels and simplifies the remote deployment greatly.

We threw up 8.0(4) on a 5505 and then did a quick “show version” to confirm the new load and we found something that made our hearts sink.

UC Proxy Sessions is a licensed feature? We quickly contacted some SEs at Cisco who confirmed this is going to be a separately licensed feature. The best news is that don’t have any pricing information out for it nor have any ideas when they will start selling said licenses.

It doesn’t take a genius to determine why this is a separately licensed feature but all I hope is it a decent price and not some absorbent amount of money.

I ran into a strange issue today and had to factory default an IP phone. I hadn’t had to this since this the 79[467]0 model phones and was perplexed when I was unable to locate the option in the menu. After a quick visit to CCO I found that they appear to have changed how to do this. I actually think the new method is pretty slick. To factory restore a newer phone simply do the following:

1. Unplug Phone
2. Hold # key
3. Plug Phone In
4. Wait until the lines start flashing in order. This will keep repeating. Once this is done type “123456789*0#”.

The phone will reset itself and re-download it’s firmware. Talk about easy. No more trying to walk a user through menus.

Sorry for the abrupt absence but I have a good reason. I am a new dad! Me and my wife were blessed with a beautiful baby girl. Between her and my new job, which I started the day before she arrived, I have been slam busy.

So far everything has been pretty good at the new job. I am learning about a lot of new aspects of Cisco. The latest thing I spent some time researching was the CUWL licensing system. If you aren’t familiar with CUWL it is basically Cisco’s answer to the Microsoft EA. Instead of having to buy licensing for a large number of their applications you can simply buy a CUWL license which covers the suite of applications and also saves you some money while you are at it.

I also got to get my hands on my first DMVPN network. Unfortunately I didn’t get to work with the DMVPN directly but I got to do some basic routing and switching on the network. It was fun watching the tunnels come up and routes populate accordingly.

Well that is all for now. Time for some sleep.

After my recent purchase of an iPhone 3G I became interested in making some small applications to do some common conversions and such that I run into while doing my Networking thing. While there is a subnet calculator I wasn’t able to find a BaseConverter or an IPv4 to Hex converter. I downloaded the iPhone SDK and started poking around. I quickly realized that I don’t have time to figure all of this out right now with all my certification tests. So I decided to make some iPhone friendly web tools. So far I have a BaseConverter and IPv4 Converter.

The BaseConverter does exactly that. It converts from one base to another. It supports Decimal, Binary and Hex. The primary reason I wanted this tool is to convert those pesky Hex ports found on the NetFlow outputs on the routers.

The IPv4 Converter converts an IPv4 address to Hex format and back. I wrote this small tool because manually doing it is a pain in the butt and for some reason Cisco loves to store IPv4 addresses as Hex in traces.

I am always up for suggestions on other tools. Make sure to drop me a comment if there is something you would like to see or if you run into any bugs.

http://www.crimsonsilo.com/iphone/tools/

NOTE: Yes, these tools work fine from a normal web browser as well they are just optimized for an iPhone display.

Today marks an end of a chapter in my life. I will be leaving my current employer to start the next phase of my career working for a Cisco Partner. So much has happened both professionally and personally while I have been working for my current employer. I met my wife, got married, bought a house, deployed a couple million dollars worth of networking equipment. All in all it has been a good run. I have been very lucky to have the authority to implement massive changes in the network which benefited both the company and me personally. It has been an excellent place to grow my skill set and allow me to prepare for this next phase. It is kind of strange saying goodbye though. I have spent so many hours of my life for the last five and a half years sitting in the same office with the same people doing the same things having that go away all the sudden is going to take some adjusting. However, change is good, especially with where I am at in my career.

I am taking no time off and start my new job on Monday. I am looking forward to the new challenges I will get to face as a Cisco Partner instead of consumer. I am sure I will be posting about my adventures and what I come across!