I’m sure most of us have gone through this train wreck before, but I couldn’t seem to find any buying guides or reviews more recent than March.

Last week we bought the InTouch from Giant digital picture frame. It was only 7″, but it had a touch screen that I was adamant for. Amazon had really good reviews on it and it seemed to be a top seller. The device arrived and ran VERY sluggish. Apparently that’s the way it’s supposed to run (Windows CE). It has a ton of features, but poor execution.

The biggest headache of the product was using the FrameChannel. Documentation was awful, customer support was non-existent (opened a case last Monday, still haven’t heard back), and it is poorly documented.

This evening we bought the HP DreamScreen from Best Buy and we are pretty pleased thus far. It uses the Snapfish service which is rock solid and fast. It has a remote to make simple tasks and setup much easier and the screen is a million times better than the InTouch one.

Finished CIPT training today and now it’s time to build my lab. I have had a VMWare environment running for a while, and now it’s time to start putting it to use.

Hopefully I will be able to have CUCM, Unity and ties to Exchange.

I just need some phones now. Any leads?

In training this week on how to administer CallManager 6/7. Pretty decent so far.

Here are some of the links and posts that appear to be pretty damn handy:

http://www.globalknowledge.com/training/whitepaperlist.asp?pageid=502&wpcat=206&country=United+States

http://ephoneplanet.com/

Global Knowledge UC Blog

We just got back from Networker’s 2007. Had some fun, it was nice to get away from the day to day stuff and catch up with the guys.

Album is here.

Here’s yet another article from Scott. This one is regarding authentication of IOS 12.2 to Active Directory. This is definitely a much cheaper route to go, than Cisco’s ACS server or other methods.

Article Here.

Scott is probably one of the smartest people I know and has published a great article on his blog about how to get ESX Server and a Cisco 3560 to play nicely and optimally. blog.scottlowe.org

ca zeroize rsa
ca gen rsa key 512
show ca mypubkey rsa
ca save all
ssh 0 0 outside
ssh timeout 60

Here’s some handy commands to log changes to your switches and routers via the local log and syslog:

archive
log config
logging enable
logging size 200
hidekeys
notify syslog


To view it back:
show archive log config provisioning– this actually parses the command into a config that can be copied and pasted in.

Here’s some basic commands that every Cisco Engineer should know. However, they are so basic, that they are often overlooked:

Disable DNS Lookup
no ip domain-lookup
——————————-

Disable Switches/ Routers from being rude
line con 0
logging synchronous
If you are in the middle of typing something, the device will echo your command back to you once it’s done spitting it’s garbage out.
——————————-

setting console speed
line con 0
speed 115200
——————————-

command replacements:
wr---copy run start
wr erase---erase start
who---show users
where---show sessions
——————————-

Timestamping your logs
service timestamps log datetime localtime
——————————-

setting the clock
clock set 1:59:00 2 May 2007
clock timezone EST -5
clock summer-time EDT recurring
——————————-

Erasing interface config info
default int gig0/1
——————————-

fast debug recovery
u all
——————————-

Editing access-lists
Make sure that you are using an extended access list for this one
Router(config)#ip access-list extended TEST
Router(config-ext-nacl)#10 permit ip host 10.1.1.1 host 10.6.5.4
Router(config-ext-nacl)#20 permit icmp any any
Router(config-ext-nacl)#30 permit tcp any host 10.1.1.1
Router(config-std-nacl)#15 permit ip 10.5.5.0 0.0.0.255 any
Router#show access-list TEST

10 permit ip host 10.1.1.1 host 10.6.5.4
15 permit ip 10.5.5.0 0.0.0.255 any
20 permit icmp any any
30 permit tcp any host 10.1.1.1

Here’s a link to a pretty daunting PDF that Cisco put out about their own IPT implementation. Reader beware, this is definately not for the faint of heart.

http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ciscoitatwork/downloads/ciscoitatwork/pdf/cisco_ip_telephony.pdf