Getting Ready for Another Lab Exam Attempt

Hi,

Another post after a long time, After the unsuccessful lab attempt in July 2010, I was got really busy chasing my pending stuff. That includes both office and home. My Boss was expecting to cover all that I spent on studying and my family wanted all my attention. Thing for now started to cool down and I am again looking forward for another attempt (may be in April 2011).

I have started to putting my study material in-order, just upgraded to my PC to 4GB of memory and hard drive to 1TB. Expected to increase total memory to 8GB. Previously I had issues running GNS3/Dynamips on Windows 2003. With full scale labs, the CPU utilization goes to 80 to 90% and the I was getting problems with routing protocol adjacencies. One of my friend, who is Linux Geek, told me to run GNS/Dynamips on Linux. He gave me a brief introduction to basic workings and I was manage to install Ubuntu 10.10 x64 on home PC and laptop. Once I get accoustmed to the Linux environement, I am looking forward to install GNS/Dynamips on Ubuntu. I will be using the following tutorial for help:
http://networkingtips-tricks.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-install-gns3-on-ubuntu-1004-lts.html

Looking forward to happy labbing!

CCIE R&S Lab Attempt

Hi to all,

I am making this post after quite a long time. I was busy in preparing for the lab and plus the office work. So it was quite impossible to update the blog.

I took the lab attempt on July 15, 2010. Unfortunately, I could not pass the exam, but overall it was a good experience. I learned two things from this attempt:
1- Temperament - If you panic, you are already doom.
2- Time management - If you can't manage time, you are not ready to attempt the lab.

For the preparation, I used Narbik Advance Technology and Troubleshooting Workbook. I was fortunately made to the top 20 list on the CCIE Flyer Troubleshooting Contest held in February 2010. I won these workbooks in this competition.

For full scale lab I used INE Vol-2 workbook. For most of the practice, I used GNS3/Dynamips and some rack rental from INE. I think INE should now upgrade the rack, still using 2651XM series and 3550 series switches. 2651XM are really slow in case if a reboot is required.

Anyways... I am back on track again and hopefully attempt the lab by the end of August.

Connecting Nortel 61c and 11c PABXes - Part II

Greeting to all:

It is a long time since my last post. I was preparing for my CCIE R&S Written exam and I have finally passed it. Now it is time to get my hand dirty with R&S lab preparation.

Anyway... we have finally won this project and I will be taking care of implementation. After discussing with customer, we did some onsite testing with these two PABXes. The equipment used for proof-of-concept purpose only & includes Cisco 2821 and 2811 series router with VIC-2MFT-703 cards and Cisco 12.4(20)T and 12.4(3h) SP Services feature sets.

Let 2821 be Router-A and 2811 be Router-B and Nortel 11C has 12xx series of extensions and 61c has 2XXX, 3XXX, 4XXX, 5XXX, 6XXX, 7XXX series of phone extensions. Another detail that I want to point out the 61C has Class of Restrictions applied and PSTN trunk termination. Since calls will be traversing WAN, we need quality of services (QoS) and off-course the codec used is G.729. I calculated the bandwidth requirement with Cisco TAC VoIP Bandwidth calculator located at:

http://tools.cisco.com/Support/VBC/do/CodecCalc1.do.

You might need you CCO login for this website.

The customer is running EIGRP but right now I am not concerned with routing and QoS details, but he did stated that the total number of call should be under 512kbps.

The respective configuration are as follows:

2821_Router-A:

!! Connected with 11C PABX

network-clock-participate wic 3

hostname 2821_Router-A

!

voice class codec 1

codec preference 1 g729r8

!

controller E1 0/1/0

channel-group 0 timeslots 1-31

!

controller E1 0/3/0

pri-group timeslots 1-31

!

interface Serial0/1/0:0

ip address 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0

!

interface Serial0/3/0:15

no ip address

no logging event link-status

isdn switch-type primary-qsig

isdn incoming-voice voice

no cdp enable

!

dial-peer voice 1200 pots

description ** to 11c extensions **

destination-pattern 12..

port 0/3/0:15

forward-digits all

!

dial-peer voice 2000 voip

description ** to 61c extensions **

destination-pattern ....

voice-class codec 1

session target ipv4:192.168.1.2

!

end

2811_Router-B:

!! Connected with 61C PABX

network-clock-participate wic 3

hostname 2811_Router-B

!

voice class codec 1

codec preference 1 g729r8

!

controller E1 0/1/0

channel-group 0 timeslots 1-31

!

controller E1 0/3/0

pri-group timeslots 1-31

!

interface Serial0/1/0:0

ip address 192.168.1.2 255.255.255.0

!

interface Serial0/3/0:15

no ip address

no logging event link-status

isdn switch-type primary-qsig

isdn incoming-voice voice

no cdp enable

!

dial-peer voice 2000 pots

description ** to 61c extensions **

destination-pattern ....

port 0/3/0:15

forward-digits all

!

dial-peer voice 1200 voip

description ** to 11c extensions **

destination-pattern 12..

voice-class codec 1

session target ipv4:192.168.1.2

!

end

FINDINGS:

Issue Number 1:

After configuring the PRI, I was continuously getting channel not available error message with Q931 debugs. Actually PABX was not configured with full PRI channels. So I asked the PABX admin and he fixed it.

Issue Number-2:

Although call were working fine but the 11c user could not hear the voice of 61c PBX users, that is it was a ONE-WAY-AUDIO-ISSUE. So what to do... I looked at the routing and verified that it is two way (and it was) so what could be the problem. May be it is the DELAY. I confirmed with ISP and doing some ping with 256 and 512 payload sized and found it under 80ms. Now it is time to do some google. I found a very good document at Cisco website. The ur l is :

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk652/tk698/technologies_tech_note09186a008009484b.shtml

Reading through the document I find out it was a Cut Through Audio problem. So the command: voice rtp send-recv on Router-B solved the problem.

Issue Number 3:

After connecting with voice gateway there is some delay in dialing extensions. This delay is eliminated as soon the the pound (#) key is pressed. Also if both PABXes are connected directly with E1, this post-dial-delay is eliminated. I am still scratching my head and hopefully this will be resolved.

Sometimes there are other thing that you must do to keep the customer happy and I call this Farmaeshi Program (in URDU) and most of the time the sales guy commits such things. So he asked if the calling name can be displayed. I was thinking that isdn supp-service name calling should solve the problem but it did not. So I have read some docs to make it happen. One thing that did came to my mind if the PABXes were sending the Calling Name and after confirming they were not. I will definitely post the solution once this issue is resolved as well.

I am looking forward for comments or suggestions on this post.

Connecting Nortol Option 61c and 11c PBXes

Yesterday, I came across a requirement of connecting two Nortel PBXes. The option 61c and 11c model. The client will do the calls between these two PBXes via IP WAN. The selected card is VIC2-2MFT-T1/E1 to connect PBXes and Data Circuits on both sites.

CCVP Mentor

A few days back a guy just popped up from some where and asked me to mentor him for CCVP.
We will be starting CVOICE 6.0 exam in the coming week.

This will be a good chance for me to put my knowledge to test, answer his queries and mentor him.

Installing Cisco Unified Communications Manager on VMWare Workstation v6.5

Dear all,

I did my CCVP 6-months back on Unified CallManager (a.k.a CCM 4.x) track. Since there will be no more Windows based release for CallManager (although Cisco did announce); it is time to move on.

I will be building CCVP lab for 6.x track and this is first tutorial. CallManager 6.x allows one-node license and 50 DLUs .

For CCM 7.x, the procedure is same except that instead of RHEL 3, select RHEL v4 as the operating system when creating virtual machine.

Check this url to download the installation video: http://ccvp-resources.4shared.com

---------
Syed Khalid Ali

Note: Requires a FLV player to view this file.