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I’ve been reading a lot of datacenter blogs lately. Inspired by the recent Thanksgiving day (in the U.S.), I’d like to say thanks to the bloggers who have kept me [...]

This blog is one of five dealing with the encryption of various Cisco UC devices.  This particular piece deals with setting up encrypted calls between phones on a cluster and [...]

The Cisco Support Community team interviewed David Hailey a few weeks ago. The interview was recently posted on the support community here:

As I mentioned in a recent blog on LDAP tools I was discussing non-UC tools used by UC engineers with a colleague. Continuing that line of thought I wanted to go into a set of audio tools that I used for tweaking prompts, ring tones, and other recorded audio files. …

Audio tools are an essential part of any UC engineer's toolkit. There are several use cases I wanted to highlight where these audio tools come in handy.  One use case is batch converting audio files for UCCX prompts. The following walk through provides a step-by-step example of using Switch Sound…

Audio tools are an essential part of any UC engineer's toolkit.  There are several use cases I wanted to highlight where these audio tools come in handy.  One use case is editing and creating UCCX prompts. The following walk through provides step-by-step procedures for using Audacity to create and edit…

Audio tools are an essential part of any UC engineer's toolkit.  There are several use cases I wanted to highlight where these audio tools come in handy.  One use case is editing and creating ring tones. The following walk throughs provide step-by-step procedures for editing ring tones and using existing…

just found out about a great tutorial on designing logging solutions by Marcus Ranum. Marcus has been doing network security work for a long time and is well known in the network security industry. I have previously referenced some of his work in my blog Handling Network Events (syslog and…

This is the third article on my series on QoS on the Nexus 5000 (N5K) and Nexus 2000 (N2K) for medical grade networks. The first article was QoS on the Nexus 5000/2000 - Part 1, the second was (Configuring) QoS on the Nexus 5000/2000 - Part 2. In the previous…

From time to time the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) administrator receives a request to block inbound calls to an organization based on the calling party number (CPN). This is commonly known as "black listing". Historically, admins could use translation profiles on dial-peers to address this need. With CUCM 8.0…

NetCraftsmen has been doing more and more Cisco Unified Communications (UC) deployments that leverage virtual server environments. Deploying UC solutions on a platform like the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) has many benefits. If you are venturing down this road, you may want to take a look at some of…

I have been looking at OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) designs to support an organization I will call Delta. [Note: I've using a mix of the old U.S. Navy Radio Alphabet and the Nato Phonetic Alphabet to generate company names...]Delta wants to extend 4 or 5 VLANs from their data center…