Upgrading Cisco Agent Desktop on Windows 10

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So we recently had the joys of upgrading our Cisco Voice setup to version 11, including our Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) system. In the process of our upgrade we had to do a quick upgrade of UCCX to 9.02 from 9.01 to be eligible to go the rest of the way up to 11, allowing us to run into a nice issue I’m thinking many others are running into.

As far as 11 is concerned the big difference is it is the first version where the Cisco Agent Desktop (CAD) is not an option as it has been replaced by the new web-based Finesse client for Agents and Supervisors. For this reason many Voice Admins are choosing to take the leap this year to 10.5 instead as it gives you the option of Cisco Agent Desktop/Cisco Supervisor Desktop (CSD) or Finesse. The problem? These MSI installed client applications are not Windows 10 compatible. In our case it wasn’t a big deal as the applications were already installed when we did an in place upgrade of many of our agent’s desktops to Windows 10, but attempting to do an installation would error out saying you were running an unsupported operating system.

*DISCLAIMER: While for us this worked just fine I’m sure it is unsupported and may lead to TAC giving you issues on support calls. Use at your own discretion.

Fixing the MSI with Orca

Luckily there is a way around this to allow the installers to run even allow for automated installation. Orca is one of the tools available within the Windows SDK Components download and it allows you to modify the parameters for Windows MSI packages and either include those changes directly into the MSI or to create a transform file (MST) so that the changes can be … Go Read More →

Fun with the vNIC Shuffle with Cisco UCS

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Here at This Old Datacenter we’ve recently made the migration to using Cisco UCS for our production compute resources. UCS offers a great number of opportunity for system administrators, both in deployment as well as on going maintenance, making updating the physical as manageable as we virtualization admins are getting used to with the virtualized layer of the DC. Of course like any other deployment there is always going to be that one “oh yeah, that” moment. In my case after I had my servers up I realized I needed another virtual NIC, or vNIC in UCS world. This shouldn’t be a big deal because a big part of what UCS does for you is it abstracts the hardware configuration away from the actual hardware.

For those more familiar with standard server infrastructure, instead of having any number of physical NIC in the back of the host for specific uses (iSCSI, VM traffic, specialized networking, etc) you have a smaller number of connections as part of the Fabric Interconnect to the blade chassis that are logically split to provide networking to the individual blades. These Fabric Interconnects (FI) not only have multiple very high-speed connections (10 or 40 GbE) but each chassis typically will have multiple FI to provide redundancy throughout the design. All this being said, here’s a very basic design utilizing a UCS Mini setup with Nexus 3000 switches and a copper connected storage array:

ucs-design

So are you starting to thing this is a UCS geeksplainer? No, no my good person, this is actually … Go Read More →

Getting the Ball Rolling with #vDM30in30

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Ahh, that time of year when geeks pull that long forgotten blog site out of the closet, dust it of and make promises of love and content: #vDM30in30. If you aren’t familiar with the idea, vDM30in30 is short for Virtual Design Master 30 blog posts in 30 days, an idea championed by Eric Wright of discoposse fame to get bloggers out there to work their way through regular generation of content. As you can see from this site new content is pretty rare so something like this is a welcome excuse to focus and get some stuff out there. vDM30in30 runs through the month of November and the best way to follow along with the content is to track the hashtag on twitter.

So What’s the Plan?

I’m a planner by nature so if I don’t at least have a general idea this isn’t going to work at all. The good news is I’ve got quite a few posts that I’ve been meaning to work on for some time so I’m going to be cleaning out my closet this week and get those out there. So the full schedule is going to look like this:

  • Week of Nov 1: random posts I’ve never quite finished but need to be released
  • Week of Nov 7: focus on all the new hotness coming from Veeam Software
  • Week of Nov 14: VMware’s upcoming vSphere 6.5 release
  • Week of Nov 21: randomness about community, career and navel gazing in general

I’m really looking forward to participating this year as I do believe that a lot of growth comes from successfully forming out thoughts and putting them down. Hope you find some of this hopeful, if there is anything you’d like to see in the space feel free to comment.

Lots of new stuff coming from Veeam

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Veeam had what they called “THEIR BIGGEST EVENT EVER” and while it at times did seem to be really heavy on the sales for the sake of sales pitch, there was a lot of stuff to legitimately be excited about for those of us who use their products. From the features coming in Veeam Backup & Replication in version 9.5 in a couple of months through the first new feature of next year’s version 10 all in total there were 5 major announcements here today that those of us using the product can make use of. In this post I’m going to run briefly through these and in the coming months will provide some deeper insights when possible.

Veeam Backup & Replication / Veeam ONE 9.5 (October 2016)

  • Nimble Storage Integration- Nimble with be the next vendor after EMC, NetApp and HP storage systems that will allow Veeam to interact at the array level, allowing for backups from snapshot. If you are a Nimble customer (like me) this is going to be some good stuff
  • Advanced usage of Windows Server 2016 ReFS- This is the real gravy here for anybody who is having to work with any kind of synthetic operations with their backup files. Through an integration Veeam has with Microsoft when ReFS is used to back your Veeam repositories your weekly rollups are going to take a heck of a lot less time and as well as see less storage consumption for long terms “weekly fulls”.  This is due to ReFS’ basic mechanism where file copies and moves never actually move data, it just moves the pointers. An example I’ve seen is on a 10 GB change rate backup the weekly full went from 35 minutes on NTFS to 5 minutes on ReFS. Now move that out … Go Read More →

VMware Tools Security Bug and Finding which VMware Tools components are installed on all VMs

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Just a quick post related to today’s VMware security advisories. VMware released a pair of advisories today, CVE-2016-5330 and CVE-2016-5331 and while both are nasty their scopes are somewhat limited. The 5331 issue is only applicable if you are running vCenter or ESXi 6.0 or 6.0U1, Update 2 patches the bug. The 5330 is limited to Windows VMs, running VMware Tools, and have the option HGFS component installed. To find out if you are vulnerable here’s a Power-CLI script to get all your VMs and list the installed components. Props to Jason Shiplett for giving me some assistance on the code.

While the output is still a little rough it will get you there. Alternatively if you are just using this script for the advisory listed you can change  where-object { $_.Name -match $componentPattern }  to  where-object { $_.Name -match "vmhgfs" } . This script is also available on GitHub.

The Unofficial Official CiscoLive! US Gatherings Page

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Here’s the list of all the outside of business hours events that I and others know of at CiscoLive 2016. If you know of others please DM or tweet me @k00laidIT and I’ll get them added.

 

Saturday 7/9/2016
Adventure to  National Atomic Testing Museum

  • 2 PM
  • 755 E Flamingo Rd, Las Vegas, NV 89119 (Map)
  • #clatomic 

Sunday 7/10/2016
#CLUS Sunday Tweetup

  • 5:30 PM
  • Social Media Central, Bayside Foyer, Mandalay Bay

Monday 7/11/2016
Veeam & Nimble Integration party at Cisco Live!

Tuesday 7/12/2016
SD-WAN Mixer with Packet Pushers’ Ethan Banks

Meraki After Party

Wednesday 7/13/2016
Customer Appreciation Event

The Basics of Network Troubleshooting

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The following post is something I wrote as an in-house primer for our help desk staff. While it a bit down level from a lot of the content here I find more and more the picking and reliably going with a troubleshooting methodology is somewhat of a lost art. If you are just getting started in networking or are troubleshooting connectivity issues at your home or SMB this would be a great place to start.

We often get issues which are reported as application issues but end up being network related. There are a number steps and logical thought processes that can make dealing with even the most difficult network issues easy to troubleshoot. The purpose of this post is to outline many of the basic steps of troubleshooting network issues, past that it’s time to reach out and ask for assistance.

  • Understand the basics of OSI model based troubleshooting

    The conceptual idea of how a network operates within a single node (computer, smartphone, printer, etc.) is defined by something called the OSI reference model. The OSI model breaks down the operations of a network into 7 layers, each of which is reliant on success at the layers below it (inbound traffic) and above it (outbound traffic). The layers (with some corresponding protocols you’ll recognize) are:

    7. Application: app needs to send/receive something (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, anything that the user touches and begins/ends network transmission)
    6. Presentation: formatting & encryption (VPN and DNS host names)
    5. Session: interhost communication (nothing to see here:))
    4. Transport: end to end negotiations, reliability (the age old TCP vs. UDP debate)
    3. Network: path and logical addressing (IP addresses & routing)
    2. Data Link: physical addressing (MAC addresses & switches)
    … Go Read More →

    • Vegas Baby! Heading to CiscoLive! 2016

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    As 2016 moves into April we find ourselves ready to go into the conference season once again. For the past couple of years I’ve been to VMworld because that is where my work has had me focused, but for the same reason I will be heading the Cisco Live in Las Vegas, NV this year. The event will be held at the Mandalay Bay Resort July 10-14. Yes it will be hot, but let’s be honest you are going to be inside most of the time. This is the 2nd time I’ve attended Cisco Live US (you may see it referred to as #CLUS quite a bit) and if this is anything like the last time it’s going to be great. I have been particularly impressed with the content they make available and the community that has grown around it.

    What to do

    The first and foremost thing you should check out at Cisco Live is the always excellent sessions throughout the conference. If you are new to conferences this is actually something to consider sooner than later; the session catalog is currently up and the scheduler will open on May 3. I recommend that if you have any particular sessions or focus you are looking at with this trip go ahead and have a list done early and then be ready on the 5/3, many popular sessions will fill up quickly and nobody wants to wait in the overflow line. 😉

    To be honest if you just look at the scope of topics covered in the session list it is a bit overwhelming. While I’m no grizzled veteran of conferences by any means what I’ve found best is to pick a focus or two and then start there. For example this year we have a big focus on … Go Read More →

    Quieting the LogPartitionLowWaterMarkExceeded Beast in Cisco IPT 9.0.x Products

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    As a SysAdmin I’m used to waking up, grabbing my phone and seeing the 20 or so e-mails that  the various systems and such have sent me over night, gives me an idea of how the day will go and what I need start with. Every so often though you get that morning where the 20 becomes 200 and you just want to roll over and go back to bed. This morning I had about 200, the vast majority of which was from my Cisco Unified Contact Center Express server with the subject “LogPartitionLowWaterMarkExceeded.” Luckily I’ve had this before and know what to do with it but on the chance you are getting it too here’s what it means and how to deal with it in an efficient manner.

    WTF Is This?!?

    Or at least that was my response the first time I ran into this. If you are a good little voice administrator one of the first things you do when installing your phone system or taking one over due to job change is setup the automatic alerting capability in the Cisco Unified Real Time Monitoring Tool (or RTMT, you did install that, right?) so that when things go awry you know in theory before the users do. One of the downsides to this system is it is an either on or off alerting system meaning what ever log events are saved within the system are automatically e-mailed at the same frequency.

    This particular error message is the by-product of a bug (CSCul18667) in the 9.0.x releases of all the Cisco IP Telephony products in which the JMX logs produced by the at the time new Unified Intelligence Center didn’t get automatically deleted to maintain space on the log partition. While this has long since been fixed phone systems are … Go Read More →

    Updating the Photo Attributes in Active Directory with Powershell

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    Today I got to have the joys of needed to once again get caught up on importing employee photos into the Active Directory photo attributes, thumbnailPhoto and jpegPhoto. While this isn’t exactly the most necessary thing on Earth it does make working in a Windows environment “pretty” as these images are used by things such as Outlook, Lync and Cisco Jabber among other. In the past the only way I’ve only ever known how to do this is by using the AD Photo Edit Free utility, which while nice tends to be a bit buggy and it requires lots of repetitive action as you manually update each user for each attribute. This year I’ve given myself the goal of 1) finally learning Powershell/PowerCLI to at least the level of mild proficiency and 2) automating as many tasks like this as possible. While I’ve been dutifully working my way through a playlist of great PluralSight courses on the subject, I’ve had to live dangerously a few times to accomplish tasks like this along the way.

    So long story short with some help along the way from Googling things I’ve managed to put together a script to do the following.

  • Look in a directory passed to the script via the jpgdir parameter for any images with the file name format <username>.jpg
  • Do an Active Directory search in an OU specified in the ou parameter for the username included in the image name. This parameter needs to be the full DN path (ex. LDAP://ou=staff,dc=foo,dc=com)
  • If the user is found then it will make a resized copy of the image file into the “resized” subdirectory to keep the file sizes small
  • Finally the resized image is then set as the both the thumbnailPhoto and jpegPhoto attribute for the user’s AD account

    • So your basic … Go Read More →