The NET (nee Quintum) Tenor gateway family has recently seen a functionality injection with the introduction of what they’re calling “108 Routing”.
Until now the Tenor has had some limitations in its routing capabilities. One such restriction was that the outbound (IP) destination was either H.323 or SIP – you could never run both in the one box.
With the 108 firmware release things changed, and now the Tenor supports “any to any” routing.
Every so often I want to add some new functionality in a live Lync system, and it needs to be tested before it goes live.
My normal approach to this is to add routing for a fake country code to get the call to the relevant gateway, then change the number back to something genuine in the gateway before dropping it to the Carrier.
Country code “83” is one of the few 2-digit codes that’s spare, and it’s the one I normally use. (You can find the codes in use here).
Another option that you might be able to squeeze in underneath the existing voice policies is to use a “fake” area code – one that you know doesn’t exist.
Just hand-normalise the number into whatever format you want – making sure your policy allows calls to that country or area – then test away. :-)
In most usual test scenarios I just key +83 instead of Australia’s +61, then add the rest of the digits as I would normally. When the call gets to (in this case my NET VX Gateway) I have a rule for “\+83{+}” that changes the dialled number back to “+61\1”, and it then takes my special path.
On a recent deployment I found *2* of my 3 UM servers wouldn’t play.
I had lots of EventID 1000:
Faulting application name: UMworkerprocess.exe, version: 14.1.323.0, time stamp: 0x4dedcdd2
Faulting module name: Microsoft.Rtc.Internal.Media.dll, version: 3.5.6907.206, time stamp: 0x4c2c21fe
… and EventID 1038:
The Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging service was unable to start. More information: "Microsoft.Exchange.UM.UMService.UMServiceException: The UM worker process exceeded the configured maximum number of consecutive crashes, "5".
… Followed by a 1430:
The Unified Messaging server shut down process umservice (PID=22228) because a fatal error occurred.
The fix was a simple one.
I’d installed the UCMA Core Runtime from here, but that only installed UCMA @ 6907.210. I needed to add the update from here. And that took us to 6907.225, and the service started straight away. Being the lazy sod I am, I downloaded the ServerUpdateInstaller.exe and used that instead of the ucmaredist.msp. I like the little user interface the former gives…
BTW, i noted that the download page is titled “6907.236” (dated 6/9/11, which I’m guessing was June given it’s a US site), but clearly ucma hasn’t been updated beyond 225. So don’t be worried by that.
So why the reference to 206 in the first error? I’m guessing I had a discrepancy between 2 software components, so bringing the second into alignment (or greater) by installing the MSP sorted it. (I confirmed this when I applied the same fix to the second server).
Credit to John Weber for this fix.
G.
Manually keying a large site’s dial plan into Exchange to cater for the various combinations of exchange prefix & extension number is tedious and frankly quite boring. Import-CSV to the rescue!
Thankfully these days most customers are loathe to permit Exchange to route a call to anyone other than an internal extension. Those of us who’ve been in the industry long enough will have scars from exposure to a customer being phreaked (and the 6-figure phone bills), so a request to enable “thru-dialling” these days usually receives an “over my dead body”-style response.
The upside is that we now don’t need to worry about building GIANT tables in Exchange with the myriad of possible PSTN prefixes and destinations, instead only requiring just those that belong to the site.
Continue reading ‘Import Exchange Dialing Rule Groups from CSV’ »
If you have multiple Front-End servers, your account will be randomly homed to one of them, and it’s not revealed if you just get-csuser. You need to Get-CsUserPoolInfo <username>. This won’t spell it out for you, but you should be able to figure out which FE is which.
Alternatively, Get-CsUserPoolInfo <username> | Select-Object -Expand PrimaryPoolMachinesInPreferredOrder will ID the server, down to its FQDN. I’m yet to find a way I can move a user to a different Front-End. Call me fussy, but I always like to have MY account on the first FE.
Continue reading ‘Which Front-End server is my Lync account registered to?’ »
When you’re on a new or unfamiliar customer’s site it’s sometimes a challenge to locate their CA.
In the past (assuming a working Lync or OCS installation) I’ve stepped through the “Request, Install or Assign Certificates” stage in setup.exe / Deployment Wizard, purely because it automatically detects the PKI CA (but then won’t let you scrape it to the clipboard). Tedious but effective.
Turns out all you need to do is run this command in a DOS box from a modern-vintage machine (e.g. Win 7 client or Server 2008), and it will reveal all:
certutil -config - -ping
That’s not a typo: it’s certutil space minus config space minus space minus ping.
Sweet.
I recently ran up the Lync client on a HP Compaq L2105tm touch-screen and was surprised by some of the extra functionality that’s snuck in there.
This is SO simple, but *so* well received. Click the photo for a high-res, drool-worthy closeup.
NET’s vxBuilder application has a handy “Recent” list that serves as a directory of your most-visited sites.
I recently decided that the growing list of IP addresses needed to go and be replaced by their names.
It didn’t take long to find the list – it’s tucked away in the Registry at HKCU\Software\Network Equipment Technologies\SHOUTbuilder\Recent, and changing the IPs to names is as simple as editing the value there.
Needless to say, I don’t recommend trying this while vxBuilder is running!
– G.
With Lync CU3 hot off the press, I decided to consolidate all of the links for easy reference later.
At the time of writing, the latest Lync Attendant hotfix is CU2 (.253), as is the Lync Attendee (Admin / User install).
Should any of these be updated I’ll revise this post. If you find one I’ve missed please let me know.
– G.