Category: Shoretel Training

ShoreTel fail over options using VMware – Part 2 the “Poor Man” Option!

Posted on by DrVoIP

A simple yet very effective step you can take to assure a high availability  is all but free!  It occurs to us that it is no longer acceptable to install ShoreTel on anything other than a VMware ESXi server!  Lets face it, you have to purchase a hardware package to host your server regardless of which way you go.   You have to purchase a copy of Microsoft Server, regardless of which way you go.  So how do we make this more cost effective?   From our perspective upgrade the hardware platform you have to purchase anyway,  to be a quad core with about 16 -32 GB of memory.  ESXi is still available for free, so download and install it on that platform then install the Microsoft Server on top of it!

Now you have your ShoreTel HQ server at the HQ site.  No harm no foul and you are positioned to do some really kool things.  First, clone the Microsoft Server and bring it up as a DVM.  The key here is to install the DVM at the same level as the HQ server, not below it as a child server.  Put you HQ users on this server and have this server manage all your HQ site ShoreGear switches.   The reason for this is, it is the cheapest most cost effect fail over you can provide.  ShoreTel servers fail up, OR across but not down. This means if the DVM fails, the HQ server will proxy for it for those users!  Forget all that Double Take Double Talk!  Just do it.

While you are at it, bring up a virtual ShoreGear User switch as a “spare” switch and also install the vConference switch. The spare switch enables you to spin up an alternative switch for any site, if a switch at a site goes down.  No cost to you unless you don’t fail bak in under 45 days! Why would you not do that?  Why would you work with a partner who did not just do this as a “best practice”.   Come on guys, this is like deployment 101,  just do it.  The freaking conference server is “free” as an IM solution and the licenses for the conference bridge and desktop sharing users is cost effective when compared to anything in the market including GoTomeeting and Webex!   Again, what is there to think about?

So now you have your VMware platform offering a HQ server, a fail over DVM server, User Switch and an IM server.   Consider that for the cost of a Microsoft Server (you saved that by cloning one, remember) you can purchase (hoepfully from us)  a copy of vmware Essentials.  This package adds vCenter to the mix and now you are kicking it.    vCenter sets up a centralized administration interface for your ESXi servers.  You can now setup heartbeats between the ESXi host and the VM machines as long as they are running VMware tools.   You can also run heartbeats between vCenter and the ESXi hosts so that on failure of a heartbeat, vCenter launches another instance of whatever serer went down on another cluster host!

Are you freaking kidding me?

The video shows you how to install the DVM at the same level as the HQ server and how to clone a virtual machine.  Subsequent videos will explore the high availability and Fault Tolerant options available with vCenter and clustered ESXi hosts.

 

A ShoreTel Communicator for the Mac?

Posted on by DrVoIP

We recently had an opportunity to work with a ShoreTel client that was exclusively using Apple Mac’s throughout their enterprise.   We asked how they made that decision given the clear cost advantage WinTel PC hardware had over your basic Macbook.   The answer was simple and clearly economic.   They had used Windows in the past, but found that they had to many problems with virus, email, drivers and the annual cost of license renewals! Yes the Mac’s cost more but they just seem to work and they don’t have to worry license issues.    Interesting.

This was a ShoreTel deployment so that made for some interesting trade offs when it got down to the desktop software.   The ShoreTel Communicator is optimized for the Windows based machines.    There are several license types for Personal, Professional, Workgroup Agent, Workgroup Supervisor and Operator Communicators.   With the Mac, there is only one Communicator and it has the functionality of the ShoreTel Web Communicator which is basically a Personal Communicator.

It does however get the job done as far as call handling modes, inbound primary phone options, multiple call management and visual voice mail.  You can setup your call handling modes including your personal operator and find me functions for each mode.  You can configure and select 5 alternative phones and setup your incoming call routing to include simultaneous ringing of other phones.   The visual voice mail tab works just like you would expect and you can also select a history and call details tab.

The noticeable difference is the absence of IM options.  ShoreTel had been suggesting the use of iChat for that function as that client was supported on the ShoreTel SA-100/400 conference servers.   In the Communicator there is always more than one way to do something: point and click, right click, use some chord sequence on the keyboard that includes the control key.   Right clicking on a Mac Communicator however is not going to work!  There is however, drop down menu options that appear as required to assist your call management.   All in all, the Mac client is an excellent solution if you have a Mac and a ShoreTel.  You can download the MAC dmg installation file from the ShoreTel HQ server and you are good to go!

ShoreTel iPBX phone system Training!

Posted on by DrVoIP

Phone Training is a double edged sword.   Everyone wants it  but nobody really wants to make the time commitment required to get comfortable with the new phone features that a system like ShoreTel brings to your  business.   Most folks figure it is a phone, how complex can it be?   That is true, ShoreTel phone are easy to manipulate and most features are intuitive.   There are however, a range of features that improve customer care, increase availability and enable you to achieve priority call management that are new concepts in business communications.   These features deserve some attention and the hour or so invested in learning about call handling modes, primary phones, simultaneous ring, follow me and custom call routing enjoy more than favorable return on time invested.

In addition to basic user training (we have to find another word to replace user, sounds like drug addict) ShoreTel has applications that also require training.  For example if you have an Enterprise Contact Center or a Work group environment, you will need to provide instruction for your Agents and Supervisors.    Are you using CRM connectors like Salesforce and Microsoft?  Do you have a custom application integrated with your ShoreTel?  Maybe the Recording or 911 application?   How about the Mobility server?   Are you using the iPhone and android aps?  Finally, all of these system need an educated System Administrator to handle adds moves and changes, who is going to provide that training?

When it comes to the basic ShoreTel phone system,  typically we break user training into basic phone handling and save the Communicator as a separate session.   Not everyone needs to learn Communicator, but everyone in the enterprise needs to know the basics phone function if they are going to be effective come “go live”.   How to setup your voice mail, assign your extension, manage multiple calls, transfer, conference and park are essential tricks that all employes should learn.   Generally, this is a 30-45 minute session and groups of 10 people around five handsets with an instructor using a projector for the call manager is a minimum training environment.  Like wise, to get through the Communicator, it will take another 45 minutes.   If you have to train several hundred people, over multiple sites, training is going to be a significant time investment and several days of Per Diem for an instructor on site!

We have found that web based training can be very effective for all of the various types of users that need to better understand these systems.    You can do large groups and a much lower cost without sacrificing the informational content.  Though we find mufti-media self paced training resources to be a very valuable as refrenece material or to help future new team members get up to speed, it is generally agreed that having an insturctor led webinar is a better solution.   The instructor can be aware of the specific configurations that uniquely define every deployment and can answer questions, propose feature solutions and generally help folks better understand the rich library of features they are about to make use of.  System Administration is without question easily done by web, as you are just going to log into a Shareware Director portal anyway!   No need for everyone to hurdle in the server room!

We can help you with distance learning solutions (or come on site) custom tailored to you deployment.  We can cover the full range of ShoreTel products and generally enjoy helping folks!   Give us call or  Text “ShowMe” to 15165197813 and we will setup a meet!

 

 

 

 

 

 

ShoreTel fail over options using Vmware – Part 1 Building a VMware Test Lab!

Posted on by DrVoIP

The most often asked question we hear among ShoreTel system administrators is how best to achieve “fail over”, assure high availability and assure business continuity? There is no simple answer to this question nor is there any one “best practice”. It is going to depend on any number of interrelated issues including budget, facilities, availability and down time goals. With unlimited funding there are many more options then there are if we have a very limited budget. Is our deployment located in a single facility or scattered across multiple sites? Do we have an onsite data center or a “cloud” or collocation facility. Can we tolerate any down time at all or are we looking for hot fail over with no service interruption?

Redundancy by itself is not sufficient to guarantee high availability or continued uninterrupted business operations. Two power supplies are always better than one (especially if they are plugged into separate electrical sources) and RAID disk arrays are more reliable than a single spinning hard disk and iSCSI may even be a better. Many system administrators have explored commercial options like Double Take with its active/active fail over strategy.

At the end of the day, our view is that multiple hosts across multiple locations in a virtual or cloud based deployment are you best options. We think VMware and Amazon are unstoppable solutions providing high availability and business continuity assurance that maximizes budget, simplifies administration and with the lowest risk. Though we will have much more to say about Amazon Web Services, especially how it can best interface with VMware, we are going to demonstrate several configuration built on the vSphere ecosystem.

In our opinion  your ShoreTel partner should have installed your deployment on VMware from the onset.  A single VMware ESXi hypervisor host running your ShoreTel HQ Server and a ShoreTel Distributed Voice Mail server with the DVM installed at the same site and at the same level as the HQ server, will provide a very effective fail over solution at the lowest possible cost.   VMware Essentials gets you ESXi and vCenter for $540, what is to think about? A single hardware host with two virtual Windows servers, a shared iSCSI data store and a copy of FreeSCO  will best any effort to run redundant HQ servers!   ShoreTel servers can fail up, so just put all of your HQ switches and Users on the DVM and if it fails, HQ will take over.  If HQ fails, no  real harm done.

Sounds like a lot of hardware complexity but we are going to demonstrate this on a lab system consisting of a single Windows Laptop! Through the miracle of VMware,  Openfiler and FreeSCO we are going to create this entire solution and use it to prove out several different “fail over” strategies that can be used to develop “high availability” options for your ShoreTel deployment.   Additionally if your are just learning VMware, this will be an excellent  “play pen” and “sand box”and learning environment,  well within the budget of any serious student of virtualization. If you can access a lap top the rest of the requirements can be obtained as open source “free ware” or evaluation software. So lets lose the excuses and get to work!

Building your “Sandbox”!

Our test environment will consist of 3 ESXi Hosts, an iSCSI data store, a CISCO compatible routers; two Windows servers; and  two XP or better Windows PC’s.  As this entire lab will be built out on a single device here is the “parts list”:

(a) Windows laptop – If you have several spare PC’s or servers that you can make use, of great but we can build out this entire test lab on a single laptop. The only requirement is that we need 16GB of RAM! as long as you can expand the memory to at least 16GB.

(b) Your first lesson in virtualization is to understand the difference between a type 1 and a type 2 hypervisor. VMware ESXi is a type 1 hypervisor and that means that it is installed on a bare metal host computer, typically an appropriately configured server.  VMware Workstation is a type 2 hypervisor meaning it is installed on top of an operating system, like Windows,  already installed on a bared metal hardware platform.  In this case, we have a laptop running Windows 8 and we are going to install VMware Workstation on top of Windows. You can download an evaluation copy of VMware Workstation from http://www.vmware.com/products/workstation/workstation and when the 90 day  evaluation is up, if you can find $249, it is our recommendation that no VoIP Engineer or Field technician should be without this a lap top running product.

(c) ESXi is a type 1 hypervisor and the really good news is it that it is still available absolutely free of charge. This will be the core of our test lab and we will build out three hosts, all running in VMware Workstation on our laptop, to support our ShoreTel deployment.

(d) Building out a ShoreTel HQ server under ESXi as a single server is what most folks do.  If you are going for high availability, however, you need to consider the size of your data store.   Even if you are only restoring a “snap shot”, the size of your data store may be the limitation that determines down time.  Rather than store the application data on the Windows server used for your ShoreTel HQ erver, we recommend that you install an iSCSI data store on your LAN.  In this way , if you have to restore the server, you will already have the data store available (this is where AWS S3 comes into play, so see our previous blog regarding backup strategies).  You can download community edition of Openfiler  the iSCSI data store we are going to deploy in this lab from http://www.openfiler.com/community/download as we will be configuring our deployment based on the availability of network area storage.

(e) One of the “must have” software tools in our Engineering laptop tool kit is a three interface router named FreeSCO!  It is pronounced “Free CISCO”as a take off on our favorite company to hate.  For those of you who ever wanted to deploy a fully functioning CISCO router from a USB drive,  down load this now from www.freesco.org or download the ova we created which is available in the member portal of the DrVoIP web site.

(f) Lastly, you will need Windows Server software, either Windows 2008 or 2012.   You can  download an evaluation copy from Microsoft at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dn205302.aspx if you do not have a copy kicking around your lab.

(g) Lastly, ShoreTel has never asked for our opinion but they do not make evaluation software easily available to lab environments or to students who hope to be future ShoreTel VoIP engineers.  ShoreTel software can only be legally obtained by purchasing a system or through a support agreement from either a ShoreTel partner or directly from ShoreTel TAC.  If you are a partner or covered under a support agreement, you can down load all sofware from the ShoreTel site.  The iPBX software will run license free for 45 days.   Our lab is going to make use of the ShoreTel HQ server, the ShoreTel DVM Server and several virtual Shoregear voice gateways.

The DrVoIP video demonstrates how this lab is constructed and how the various components are installed and is part of the over all VMware training material available (or soon to be posted) on the DrVoIP website.   This lab will enable you to not only become very comfortable with VMware in general, but help you explore the various options for providing high availability and business continuity to your ShoreTel deployment.

ShoreTel ECC MySQL rants, raves and solutions for email, chat and text (SMS) messaging!

Posted on by DrVoIP

If you have worked with ECC custom integrations for any length of time, you have build a library of solutions to work with.  Most recently you have discovered that a 32 bit application like ECC, running on a 64 bit Windows 2008 or 2012 server needs a 32 bit OBDC driver!   When you click on Data Sources in Windows, you are shocked to notice that none of the ECC database connectors are showing under the DSN tab in the OBDC data source administrator.   You then go to add a driver for that new MySQL application your client wants and install and test it connects OK.  Then you log into Contact Center Director and notice that the OBDC connector does not show up in the list of external database connections.  WTF?   Well this turns out to be a Microsoft issue, but you have to find a solution anyway!   So you learn to ignore the normal Data Source Administrator installation procedure.  Find the correct OBDC driver and download it to C:\Windows\SysWOW64 for example C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.  (Much thanks to Tyler and Mark at ShoreTel TAC for this insight).  Clicking on this will bring up the 32 bit version of the OBDC Source Administrator and you will find that DSN now displays both your new connector and the existing ECC connectors!

Version 9 of ECC has some changes that you need to be aware of, most notable of which is the lack of support for POP email mail connectors.  IMAP is now your only option.  If you are going to create ShoreTel ECC Email connectors you will need to get the co-operation of the client IT department, most of which go nuts when you tell them that you want to turn this protocol on in their Exchange sever.  If you are using Microsoft Office 365 you have other challenges.    If you want to add CHAT then you will also need to get IT to provide you a Tomcat server!   In a deployment with an ShoreTel iPBX,  ECC and IRCC server and just cant bring myself to tell the client they need yet another instance of MySQL on yet another server!   To overcome some of these challenges and to make my life as a deployment engineer a bit more predictable, I have developed my own solution!

If I work with a client that is going to deploy ShoreTel ECC using CHAT, Email and also expects to do some SQL data dips, I prefer to provide my swiss army knife solution.  We created a Linux appliance that supports a number of required integration components that we can fully control without relying on the client IT organization.  The small 19”rack mounted appliance houses the following:

(a) Our favorite distribution of Linux;
(b) MySQL Server and Postgresql Server;
(c) Apache Server;
(d) TomCat Server;
(e) Mercury Mail:
(f) VPN, SSH and FTP servers;
(g) Webmin and phpmyadmin admin tools;
(h) php, perl and some other development tools
(I) A library of network assessment and monitoring tools;

MySQL and PostgreSQL are absolutely necessary for doing any type of external “look up” and route functions.    ShoreTel does not provide ‘root’ access to the MySQL instances running on the other three servers, so you have to do something!   Unless you want to jerk around with the clients IT organization or database team, we recommend you roll your own.   Likewise with email.  Just setup Mercury Mail to handle your ECC email accounts and be done with it.   It will cost you another C and MX record, but so what.   Most of our ECC applications need a web sever and rather than deal with TAC on what is and what is unsupported on a ShoreTel server running Microsoft IIS, just use Apache and be done with it!   To do CHAT on ShoreTel ECC you will need a Tomcat server as well.  For less money than will be wasted on professional service hours chasing other folks around so you can do you work, this is a great solution for ShoreTel ECC integrations, email and Chat!  (Since we do have root access to the vmware image ShoreTel provides for the conference server, that might also be an option.   We will take a look and update you later – DrVoIP).

 

Editing ShoreTel System Prompts or WTF is a PHR file?

Posted on by DrVoIP

“Welcome to the ShoreTel Conferencing” sounds like a commercial announcement and many system owners want it changed! After all they just paid a big whack of money to own a brand new brilliantly simple phone system! Now when they have a client conference, they sound like they transferred the call to an outside third party service!  Though it is a smart move for ShoreTel marketing efforts, it is hardly the image a system owner wants to convey to their clients!  For this reason, we are often asked to change the prompt to something that sounds more like “Welcome to mycompany conferencing”. This seems like a reasonable enough request and something that should be easy to implement, right? Yet ShoreTel professional services gets about $600-$1000 for a custom prompt!  Is there a way around this?

The fact is, that it is not very easy to modify these prompts at all! Most ShoreTel vendors can’t even find the application to play the file let alone edit it as it is not a normal wav file! The file is actually a “phrase” file and is usually found with a .phr file extension.  On the ShoreTel SA-100, for example, you will find this in ftproot directory of the HQ server in the path \Inetpub\ftproot\tsu\phr\UCB. The UCB folder contains all the .phr  files for all the languages supported by the system. When the conference appliance boots up, these files are loaded onto the sever. (For you Unix heads, the appliance is a Linux platform, and you can find the files in the ShoreTel/Lib folder by entering ls -lt *.phr after changing the directory to the ShoreTel/Lib folder).  Remember, if you edit the prompts,  you will have to recreate this change  every time you upgrade the phone system and on all servers that use the conference appliance!

In the United States the correct file is the “en-us.phr” file.  If you play this file, you will understand very quickly that this is not going to be easy! The file is actually a “library” and actually contains all the “phrases” used by the system to prompt callers with audio help. The application software has to be able to set  pointers to the correct location in the .PHR phrase file.   This is similar to a format used by Dialogic back in the 80’s that set the standard for “indexed play mode” for all telephone applications.  This indicates that a phrase file must contain a unique id for each phrase in the library, so the .PHR file is more than an audio file!  Here is a list of the phrases in the .PHR file:

thank you for calling ShoreTel conferencing goodbye
a duplicate conference has been detected you will now be transferred
a duplicate conference has been detected please try again later or contact the conference host.
you will now be disconnected
sorry the key sequence entered is invalid
The conference has ended goodbye.
sorry all resources are busy please try again later or contact the conference administrator
ringsound welcome to ShoreTel conferencing, please enter an access code then press pound.
sorry that access code is invalid please try again
the conference is currently locked, please try again later or contact the conference host
you are the only person on this conference please stay on the line
the conference host has not joined the conference please stay on the line
to turn off the music please press one
please wait while your call is connected
sorry that access code is invalid good bye
at the tone please say your name and then press pound
please wait while your call is placed into the conference
has joined the conference
has left the conference
ringsound please enter the conference hosts voice mail password then press pound
if you are the conference host then you may enter the host access code followed by pound at any time
invalid password please try again or press star to join as a participant
this scheduled conference can not be started at this time as it is to early. please start it at its scheduled start time.
this scheduled conference can not be started as it is past the scheduled start time.
to start or stop recording
press pound for
this call is being recorded
the recording has been stopped
the recording can not be stopped because desktop sharing has been enabled
the recording can not start because of insufficient disk space
the recording can not start at this time
to unmute your line press pound one
to mute or unmute all lines press pound two
your line has been muted
your line has been unmuted
all lines have been muted
all lines have been unmuted
the conference has been locked
the conference has been unlocked
to lock or unlock the conference press pound five
to raise or lower your hand press pound six
your hand has been raised
your hand has been lowered
the participant names are not available
to list the participant press pound three
to return to the conference please press star
to join the conference as a participant please press star
you have been requested to join a conference please press one to be placed into the conference
to end the conference press pound 99
this scheduled conference will end in the next five minutes
this scheduled conference is starting
the conference has not yet started
please wait

It is possible to play the file using an editor like Audacity,  which will NOT recognize the file format if you double click it.   To overcome this you must  import the file as “raw data” by setting the file attributes on the import menu.  Set encoding to to ulaw and sampling to 8000 hz.   This will enable you to play the file.   That is the simple part, the trick here is to edit the audio prompts without destroying the index which is used by the application software to know how to pull the correct prompt from the phr file!   That is why professional services gets big bucks to change the prompt and why your average ShoreTel partner will not be able to help you!  Remember ShoreTel is also going to make the voice artist used is the same as the rest of the ShoreTel prompts (though some of the files in the existing en_us.phr file are clearly male voices left over from the development team).   All in all, this is a lot of work for somebody and worth every penny you pay for it!

 

ShoreTel Virtual Trunk Switch – Configuration and License impact!

Posted on by DrVoIP

ShoreTel currently has three virtual appliances that can be used in place of the Orange ShoreGear voice gateways and conference servers.  These three virtual appliances are shipped within the ShoreTel core Server Software and consist of OVA files and ISO images.  The tree appliances consist of the phone switch; the trunk switch and the Service Appliance, a virtual replacement for the SA-100 and SA-400 conference servers.   Once they are virtualized, they install exactly like the hardware versions of the Orange ShoreGear boxes.   The only noticeable difference, is that the configuration page in the ShoreWareDirector does not seem to offer up the image of the switch as it does with the hardware version.    There are no drop down boxes for configuration of switch feature options in large part because each option is defined by the OVA file.    We note only two ISO images in the FTP root of the HQ server, so we have concluded that  the same ISO is used for the phone switch as is used for the trunk switch, the differences being set by the OVA file.

Each of the virtual devices install in a very similar manner, with little difference as it relates to the bring up under VMware.    Open the proper OVA file and the hardware is appropriately configured.  Launch the machine and you will be required to provide the normal Network configuration data and identify the location of the ShoreTel HQ/FTP server.   After the machine is configured you can log in as root, run Ifconfig to check your network card settings and note the MAC address for configuration in the ShoreWareDirector.    Then bring up the cli interface using “stcli” and you will be greeted with the familiar and easy to navigate ShoreTel Switch menu system.  You will need to add the FTP, NTP and DNS address information.   Having a primary NTP source is of critical importance especially when configuring the Service Appliance used for conferencing applications.

Now that the virtual machine is configured and running you can add it in the ShoreWareDirector.   Again aside from the lack of an orange switch image on the configuration page, it installs like any other ShoreGear device.  From a license perceptive, no harm done until you actually configure a SIP trunk.   In addition to the normal SIP trunk licenses you will need for any of the hardware gateways, the vTrunk switch will require licenses as you add trunks to the virtual appliance.   All in all this is sweet stuff and you should have a ball playing with virtual switches!  The video walks you through the entire setup! – DrVoIP@DrVoIP.com

 

 

Hacking ShoreTel with Wireshark or Trouble Shooting One way Audio.

Posted on by DrVoIP

My First Hack?

When I was a little kid, back when there was black and white TV sets and 33 RPM records, I was always amazed at the work of the telephone company repair man! At that time there was only one Phone Company. When they sent a repair man out your house he arrived in a drab olive trunk like those used by the Army. The telephone repair man had a belt of tools including a very Kool line mans “butt set” or handset and some really super hand held drills and other stuff.

I remember watching as he installed our new “touch tone” wall phone! Then I watched as he took the “butt set” from his tool belt and like all those spy movies, he clipped it across the copper wires, which I later learned were Tip and Ring, to test the circuit! I did not even have to ask, I could hear it. When he clipped across the wires he could hear the conversations that were being held on that circuit. How freaking Kool is that!

Now with IP or VoIP telephony, the butt set has gone away, but listening in on phone calls is still possible. Forget the NSA, is one of your employees copying and recording your conversations to a USB drive and posting it on Facebook? The fact of the matter it is easier than using that old “butt set” which required a physical presence and an ability to touch the circuit. With VoIP, you can “remote “in from anywhere on the planet, do a remote packet capture and leave little or no trace that you were even there. In fact, using some deep net technology like Tor, or stacking multiple virtual machines in an Amazon cloud, not even the NSA could trace your route!

Network engineers long ago figured out they could not see the packets that run around the local area network, let alone those that go off into the Internet. Tools were needed to capture the packets, slow them down and sequence them through a protocol analysis. One of the early on tools to do this, now named Wireshark, is the minimum daily adult requirement for network trouble shooting and must definitely for VoIP problem analysis. With this software tool, a network engineer can capture all the traffic moving over the wired or wireless network that interconnects your office to the World Wide Web, and save it for future analysis. The TCP/IP protocol, though a mystery to the uninitiated, is like a microscope to a network engineer or serious hacker.

It continues to amaze me that technologically I can position myself as a “man in the middle” and basically watch as you type your user name and password into your favorite website. Bored teenagers or “script kiddy’s” now do this for light entertainment. Again, forget the NSA, your teenager has more ability to track your internet activity and probably more reason to do so. Now apply this concept to your VoIP network, and you have much the same situation. It is very possible to gather up the packets on your local network, or in route to your SIP provider and reassemble them into complete phone calls.

Next to QOS issues, “one way” audio issues are among the most common of VoIP network issues. When trouble shooting these kinds of issues on ShoreTel deployments, we typically telnet into each phone in the conversation and ping our way from the phone, to the default gateway and back to the other end. Invariable we find a configuration error in a default gateway somewhere on the network. QOS issues are best solved with a protocol analysis and verification of call control signals.

This is where Wireshark comes in.

Version 14 of ShoreTel simplifies the use of Wireshark. As a Network Engineer you are aware that if you install Wireshark on the ShoreTel HQ server, you are only going to see unicast packets sent to the Server or multicast broadcasts set to all devices on the network. Wireshark will not see unicast packets sent to the other devices on the network unless you setup remote monitoring or port mirroring. With Version 14 of ShoreTel, you can setup remote monitoring from the HQ server and copy packets for analysis and assembly. Voice or RTP media between ShoreTel phones and ShoreTel Switches is encrypted while on the network. Media traffic between devices in not encrypted and can be captured and played back. MGCP, unlike SIP, treats RTP as UDP and you will need to modify Wireshark preferences to capture it as playable voice.

The accompanying video walks you through the process of capturing VoIP traffic, looking at both MGCP and SIP call control and how to assemble voice and media streams for playback.

Run ShoreTel on Vmware Player or Oracle VirtualBox!

Posted on by DrVoIP

With the release of ShoreTel Version 4.2 the company introduced the concept of virtual appliances. These software objects, had the potential of replacing the Orange ShorGear hardward boxes that typically characterize a ShoreTel deployment. The wisdom of trading the power of dedicated hardware based digital signal processing chips for the variable power of a shared computing resource aside, there are any number of advantages to using “virtual machines”. Currently ShoreTel supports Vmware ESXi and Hyper-V, so we thought we would push the envelop and try alternatives, for example Oricales Virtualbox and Vmware’s Fusion and Vmware player and see what results we could achieve. Just for kicks we thought we would see if we could inport and OVA file into Amazon Web Services and run a ShoreTel switch instance in the cloud!

The ShoreTel OVA and ISO files are distributed with Version 14.2 and you can link to them in several ways. They are in the intetput, ftproot folder on the ShoreTel HQ server. You will find two folders TSU and TSV, each with an OVA file and an ISO image. The TSU folder contains the objects necessary to create the Conference Appliance and the TSV folder contains the Phone and Trunk Switch objects. Think of the OVA file as a configuration profile that draws the outline of your virtual machine and defines the basic hardware configuration. The ISO image, contains the operating system. In the case of the ShoreTel ISO, it is in fact a Windriver Linux distribution, which has its roots (excuse the Linux pun) in the https://www.yoctoproject.org.

Clearly, ShoreTel is cutting the cost of goods, by reducing the need to produce Voice Gateways. It does not look to us however, that they are passing any of that reduction off to end users however. The cost of implementing a virtual ShoreTel Gateway is not much different than the cost of actually buying the hardware solution. The motivation for using the Virtual machines must be based on something other than acquisition cost. For we engineers however, it is fun to play with. You can spin up a machine in short order and use if for 45 days before you have to pay for the licenses. In the case of the conference appliance, there does not appear to be any cost other than the hardware used to run your Virtual Machine.

There appears to be three options for virtualization: the conference server; a phone switch and a trunk switch. The conference server lets you create an environment for web based conferencing and desktop sharing. The phone switch is a direct replacement for the ShoreGear family of users switches. Likewise the Trunk Switch, enables you to create SIP Trunks. If you have no hardware to connect, there is no reason that you can not put your users on a virtual switch. In fact if you have no copper connected to your VoIP deployment in the form of analog phones, telephone company analog lines or digital lines, your entire ShoreTel soltuion can be a figment of your imagination, living only in a virtual world, HQ server included!

Ingate apparently has made a Session Border Controller that is virtualized and may be integrated with the ShoreTel Trunk Switch, but we have yet been able to get a test device in our lab. Having a Virtual Switch configured and available as a “fail-over” solution or secondary switch in a ShoreTel deployment makes a lot of sense to us. You can configure the switch, put it live in your deployment and you only pay for it if you actually fail users over to it and you have 45 days to think about it! We have been able to successfully deploy ShoreTel in an Amazon Cloud, completely in software, using SIP trunks and remote phone registrations over VPN. There are lots of powerful options for deploying a virtualized ShoreTel, limited only by your imagination!

We attempted to deploy ShoreTel on an Oracle VirtualBox but keep running into an issue with the network adapter settings. The ESXi version of Vmware allows you to create a soft ethernet switch and route it to the rest of yoru network. The VirtualBox achieves the same flexibility allows you to NAT, Bridge or establish a host only NIC card. As the Virtualized ShoreTel switch needs to communicate with the rest of your deployment, you need configure the NIC card to Bridge or NAT. Both Fusion on a MAC and VMware Player on PC’s resulted in working ShoreTel switches without to much drama. We were able to bring up VMware Player on the ShoreTel HQ server and build out a Conference Server replacement for the SA-100 Hardware solution with little issue.

Candidly, these are not supported ShoreTel configurations, but we are just engineers playing with all the kool stuff! Remember that if you clone your virtual machines you will need to change the NetBios names and IP addresses before they can be useable in the same deployment. The embedded video is an overview of how to configure both the Free Oracle Virtual Box and the Vmware Fusion for Mac and Vmware Player for Windows to run ShoreTel. Keep the cards and letters coming and remember to support the GNU project!

 

 

 

Holiday Check script is a great learning tool!

Posted on by DrVoIP

Most VoIP Engineers are not necessarily Software Engineers, so bringing up a Contact Center and scripting it are usually done by two different types of engineers.   Scripting engineers tend to have backgrounds in software development with formal education in programming structure and practices.  A solid experience in Java, PHP, Perl, SQL and other languages is very different that having a background in IP networking, telecommunications, QOS and MPLS!   That is not to say their are not Engineers that can do it all,  but you can either be a mile wide and an inch deep or an inch wide and a mile deep!  You can’t be an expert in everything!

Scripting a Contact Center using the CISCO UCCX editor and related tools is an area of  specialization.   Most engineers carry around a basic set of “start up” scripts to get a new UCCX off the ground, but most clients have contact center requirements that require CRM, Website and advance database integration that requires some additional depth of expertise in the area of software development.  Altering call flow based on external data elements is an essential part of any contact center today.  The need to retrieve data from sources outside of the script, or to update sources once the script completes has become  the minimum daily adult requirement for contact center scripting!

There is a HolidayCheck script that has been kicking around the CISCO UCCX landscape forever.  We first saw it in the Windows based UCCX before Version 8+.   It is actually a great script as it demonstrates a number of Java elements that are outside the normal cut and paste scripting ability of many newbies.   You will need to understand XML, Xpath, String Manipulation, Date Contractors and some other advanced data handling options that this script uses to modify call flow based on the day being a holiday or not.   For this reason, it makes for an  excellent learning tool if you want to get in their and dig into the details.

The  Script uses a simple XML data file containing a list of dates that are declared to be Holidays.   Generally, the script is a sub flow, called on by a parent script to determine if we need to close for the day.   The script first finds out what is the date today, then goes through the XML date list comparing each entry with todays date to make a holiday determination.  If it gets through the entire date list without a match, the returned value is false.  If it finds a match the returned value is true!  Very simple, however the process uses about every programming trick in the book and for that reason it is fun to learn how the script works.  It is highly efficient using less than 15 lines of code to do its magic!

We have also found the script to be useful for deriving other uses built on the same constructors.  For example, finding out if we should be open or closed based on the time of day.  The Time of Day Java bean in the UCCX library is great if you want to open and close once on a particular day.  If you want to open at 7AM, close at 11 for lunch, then open again at 1PM and close at 5, it is a bit more difficult.  Creating an XML document with the schedule for a particular CSQ, is a lot more useful!  In fact we can economize on script reuse by pulling CSQ details from a QueueOptions.xml file and dramatically alter the details of a specific CSQ while reusing the same core script!  XML is the way to fly, especially if you can use HTML and web technology to feed your script user specific call flow details like “call me back at this number” please.

Do to this kind of scripting you need to have a handle on string manipulation, XML,  data type conversions and Xpath.   For this reason the HolidayCheck script is a great learning tool.   The video walks throughout the details of this script and provides, we hope, some useful instruction.   We don’t know who wrote the original script, but it has been plagiarized by us all and it is remarkable when it is studied by those who want to learn its secrets!

Members can download the script from the DrVoIP.com site!