THE JOY OF A FIRST IPT CALL

 

Do you remember the first IPT call you made in your lab or at work??

I’ve got a three year old daughter. You’ll be amazed how much one can learn from these little ones.
Apparently, she’s been watching me configure my “mini-voice-lab” and making calls between HQ and Branch 1.
One of my HQ phones is a 7940 and the BR1 phone is an IP Blue soft-phone running on my laptop.

Now, either she knew what the number to dial, or she actually knew the redial button…….but all I heard was “Daddy!!!!! It is WORKING!!!!!!!”

Apparently, she made a call between the HQ and BR1 IP Phones and she could hear her voice coming out of my laptop……EUREKA!!!!!!!
I couldn’t get her away from the phone after that. I think the most fascinating thing for her was that she could hear herself through my laptop speaker. LOL!!  She kept saying “I can hear my voice”.

Now that feeling took me back to 2002…..the first time EVER I configured VoIP!!!!
The truth was I had no clue what I was doing back then.
I was a zealous intern working at a company called United Telesys (now called Emperion West Africa).

I was working with Sly, a senior engineer tasked with setting up voip for two branches of a bank (I think it was either Intercontinental Bank or Diamond Bank). One branch was located in Trans-Amadi, while the other branch was located in Olu-Obasanjo, both in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

I remember we simulated the bank’s WLAN and had two 1750’s on each end of the wireless connection.
One 1750 had an FXO, while the other had an FXS………..I can remember the feeling too well……..I was so overwhelmed when the phones rang.

I’m sure every IPT/UC Engineer has had this 1st Call feeling before……..please don’t forget it cos it’s a memory to cherish ;-)

MWI, or should I say Phantom MWI’s

We’ve just deployed some Unified Messaging (UM) servers with Primary and Failover pairs, so we’re currently migrating users from Unity Voicemail only servers (VMO) to Unified Messaging servers (UM).
The current VMO servers (3 of them) currently serve 3 clusters, consisting of about 40 sites, in a multi-tenant deployment, hence we’re running this as a phased migration.

While the migration itself is going on without stress, we started getting MWI issues on different site right after cutting them over. This had me and my colleague pulling our hair out in some occasions cos users were raising tickets like: “Can’t retrieve my messages“, “No messages but light won’t go off” “I’ve  got voicemails in my e-mail box, but the lights on my phone isn’t coming on“…….the list is endless!!!

After some troubleshooting, we found out that users weren’t deleting their messages on the VMO servers prior to migration (even though they had all been advised to listen to messages and delete them on the eve of the cutover).
Because we are cutting-over the sites in phases, we can’t take the VMO servers out of service, at least no yet cos they were still being used. Also, the project lead doesn’t want to delete the subscribers off the VMO, just in case we needed to regress.

My colleague and I came up with a simple solution with three steps:

- we launched Message Store Manager within the Unity Tools Depot and ran a script to move unread messages from inbox into deleted items or Unity Dumpster for subscribers that had been cutover from VMO to UM

- Secondly, we used Bulk Edit tool to uncheck USE MWI for Message Notification (under the messages tab)

- Lastly, we resync’ed the MWI on the new UM servers (under UTIM).

That was the last we saw of the Phanton MWIs