Cisco Mobile and Remote Access Troubleshooting Basic Connectivity

The Cisco Mobile and Remote Access (MRA) feature is a "client edge" solution that allows external software and hardware clients to register to enterprise Cisco Unified Communication (UC) solutions without requiring a VPN. Like most things, there are a lot of moving parts working together to create a relatively seamless user experience. And, like most things, the first time you deploy MRA there are a few "gotchas" that can eat up a significant amount of troubleshooting time. 

This blog entry captures procedures I use when troubleshooting or validating a MRA deployment. These procedures can be used to validate the initial deployment or they can be used to troubleshoot connectivity problems for an individual user.

Dealing with Apple Gatekeeper Unidentified Developer Error when Launching WebEx from Jabber

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that I was receiving the Apple untrusted developer error message (left) whenever I attempted to use the Meet Now functionality directly from Jabber. 




Clicking OK brings another error message and WebEx never loads. I finally got around to trying to fix the issue. This article provides the procedures I used to resolve this issue on my Mac.

Using SQL to Query SIP Trunks

This post is in response to a query I received on Twitter:

@ucguerrilla - Would you have a SQL query in your toolbox to list SIP trunks with ip address, or point me in the right direction?

This is an interesting question because the tables you need to look at may not be as obvious as seen with other queries where we need to join tables. So, let's take a look at what is involved with this query and possibly touch on some related queries.

Installing Cisco RTMT 10.5 on Apple OS X

"Could you re-post the ciscomonkey.net article covering installation of RTMT on OS X?" is a request I receive at least once a month. Well, the short answer to the question is: no, I can't repost the original content. I wasn't the original author and I am not willing to post someone else's content without their explicit consent. I doubt @ciscomonkey would mind but it still isn't cool.

That said, I have an obligation to my readers and there have been enough changes to the RTMT installer to warrant revisiting the whole process. This article provides an updated step-by-step procedure for installing RTMT on Mac OS X. The procedures cover the most recent Cisco UC applications.

Centrally Refreshing Jabber Contact Photos in MRA Deployments

I have assisted several customers with Jabber deployments lately. Almost all of them driven by the desire to implement Mobile and Remote Access (MRA). Provisioning MRA is not the topic of this article. Instead, I wanted to touch on an operational task that has annoyed me for some time. 

The issue is with caching of Jabber contact photos. Windows and Mac Jabber clients are coded to cache various things. I assume this is an effort to minimize network transactions and optimize client performance. One of the elements cached are contact photos. I have no problem with caching but, in my experience, the issue is that old contact photos tend to be permanently cached and I can't easily (i.e. centrally) force a refresh. 

I played around with some options and found a method that worked in some test environments and my own production environment. Maybe this will work for others. I would be interested in hearing about other options. Please use the comments to enlighten me and others!

Heads Up, Issues with UCM SIP Processing on 10.5(2)SU2 and 11.0

Users that recently downloaded Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) 10.5(2)SU2 [10.5(2.12900-14] or CUCM 11.0 [11.0(1.10000-10)] may have received an email from Cisco alerting them that these versions have been deferred due to some serious defects. If so, then good for you. If you ignored the e-mail then you receive the wag of the finger.

Maybe, you are managing a system affected by the defects we are going to discuss but you weren't the one to download the files. Well, in that case, you wouldn't have been alerted. In all cases, if you have installed 10.5(2)SU2 or 11.0 and are running SIP then you want to heed the warnings and look at applying the appropriate fixes. 

Using SQL To Survey Phone Station Line Appearances

A reader comment on one of the entries in the SQL Query series asks the question:

I have multiple lines associated to the same phone and i'm trying to write a query to get only Line [1] "main line" ,any help please ??

We talked about querying line appearances associated phones in one of the early installments. Now we want to turn some extra knobs to focus on specific data views. I want to provide an example query to address the readers question and also touch on another, related query to show an example of how we can find anomalous data in our UCM solution. 

There are lots of ways to look at Device/Line associations. Especially if you get into the business of identifying user/line and Directory URI associations. We won't get into all of that in this installment but I think it is a good thread to follow. So, let's consider this a "Part 1" for the time being.