Avaya/Nortel Integrated Roadmap Keynote

5
January 19, 2010
by Michael McNamara in ,

Well if you’re like a lot of us today you probably didn’t see much. I was unable to connect myself and know of three other people around the country that were also unable to connect.

Here’s the response from Avaya when I questioned them on it;

Were you aware that many Customers could not gain access to your presentation?
Please accept our apologies. Due to unprecedented demand, we experienced technical issues. The replay will be available today at 3:30pm ET, using the same link. You can also view the replay on-demand beginning 9:00am, Thursday, January 21, and will be available on demand for 6 months. It can be accessed using the same URL, user id and password that you received when you registered.

I’m in the process of trying to download the presentation and all the material. I’m hoping that I can sift through all the slides and marketing and get to the real meat, which I can then post here. In short the existing data product roadmap is getting adopted by Avaya – although I believe it’s fair to ask what is/was the data product roadmap? Let’s see it! It was obvious that the voice solutions were going to be the big issue. I heard/read that the CS1000 isn’t going anywhere anytime soon but I only heard about future support for the 1120e and 1140e IP phones, what about the millions of i2002/i2004 IP phones? I also did’t see much about the BCM/SRG other than a comment that it would continue to be manufactured into 2011.

If you’ve seen the keynote and had time to digest the information please go ahead and comment. I will update this post with additional thoughts and comments when I’ve had an opportunity to read through all the material. Hopefully I’ll be able to see the beginning of the keynote presentation today at 3:30PM.

Cheers!

Update: January 19, 2010 3:30PM

Looks like the presentation will now be available at 4:00PM as opposed to the previously announced 3:30PM.

Windows 2003 Server falls off network

1
January 14, 2010
by Michael McNamara in

Windows 2003 SP2It’s been a very interesting two days around the test lab we maintain in the organization I work. There was an issue reported to me yesterday about a server, just happened to be the primary (and only) DNS/DHCP server, that wasn’t communicating with the test lab network.  A few coworkers had already been looking at the problem for a few hours before they gave me a call.

It was a Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 server running on an HP DL580. The server had link with the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5510 and it had properly auto negotiated to 1.0 Gbps. The server had an ARP table (arp -a) with numerous entries in it. However, the server was unable to communicate or ping anything on the network, not the default gateway, not the other servers in the same VLAN, not the desktops in the same VLAN. A cursory review of the system logs on the server and switch didn’t reveal anything of interest. I didn’t believe it was the NIC, the patch cable, the switch port but we literally swapped everything including the server just taking the hard disks out of one box and throwing them into another. One of the engineers even went as far as deleting the NICs within Windows Device Manager and re-installing them after a reboot. Still the problem persisted. After looking at the problem for almost 60 minutes a small horde of folks had assembled all waiting for word on when the lab would be available so I decide to take the path of least resistance and asked the server team to re-image the server and I would rebuild the DHCP/DNS configuration and so the problem was solved.

Until I came into work today and was told of yet another server in the test lab acting identically to the server that we had re-imaged yesterday. I immediately became suspicious, was there some Trojan loose on the test lab network, was there some Microsoft Security patch gone awry, or was it something more sinister like McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) or Symantec’s Altiris. Anti-Virus sweeps and RootKit checks all came back negative and by now we had yet another server that was experiencing the same exact issue. That meant we were up to 3 servers in 2 days, 1 of which had been restored by re-imaging and rebuilding the application configuration. Later in the afternoon one of our senior engineers took to the Microsoft Knowledgebase and Google in search of answers and after noticing an interesting event in the system log,

Description: The IPSec driver has entered Block mode. IPSec will discard all inbound and outbound TCP/IP network traffic that is not permitted by boot-time IPSec Policy exemptions. User Action: To restore full unsecured TCP/IP connectivity, disable the IPSec services, and then restart the computer. For detailed troubleshooting information, review the events in the Security event log,

came across KB870910 on the Microsoft Support website. We issued the following command;

Click Start, click Run, type regsvr32 polstore.dll, and then click OK.

After a quick reboot we were back up and running again. We suspect that the local C: drive had filled up on the servers and had caused the policy store to become corrupt which was causing the IPSec service to enter ‘Block’ mode.

That was a great find Brian!

Cheers!

VLC Playback over Wireless Network

2
January 10, 2010
by Michael McNamara in

Over the past two weeks I’ve been laid up at home quite a bit. The first week I was recovering from septoplasty surgery to repair my deviated septum which is believed to be causing me some sleep apnea.  The following week I pulled a muscle in my back while laying in my daughter’s bed. If you’ve ever pulled a muscle in your back you know how painful it can be.

With all that idle time I took to watching a few classic movies that I had stored on my Windows Vista desktop computer in the basement. I was using a laptop from my bed watching the movies over 802.11b/g wireless from a share on my desktop. Unfortunately the movies would occasionally pause and start, over and over again. When I checked the statistics from VLC I noticed that I was pushing between 5MB/s and 6MB/s which is right around the peak performance for an 802.11b/g wireless network. I went digging into the VLC preferences and found an option to increase the caching/buffering which thankfully eliminated any of the pausing and starting issues.

Here’s how I made the configuration change;

Select Tools from the Main Menu bar,

Select Preferences (Ctrl-P) from the Tools drop down menu, you should see a window similar to the figure above,

In the bottom left hand corner under “Show Settings” select All,

Expand Input/ Codes

Expand Access Modules

Select File and increase the value to 10000 (10 seconds)

Select Save

Now you just need to restart VLC and you’ll notice that it will take quite a bit longer to buffer/cache before it starts playing. The buffering/caching will help prevent any drops in network performance from being visible within VLC.

You might ask what move classics I ended up watching?

  • Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
  • Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
  • Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

I also ended up watching quite a few James Bond movies including;

  • Die Another Day
  • Casino Royale
  • Quantum of Solace

Thankfully my back is feeling much better and my nose looks to be healing very nicely.

I’m curious if there is an easier way to stream movies/music around the house from Windows Media Center. I’ve read about some new players to the media extender market including Roku and Boxee. I’d love to find a solution where I could stream my movies and music around the house to either a TV of another computer.

Cheers!

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