Cisco Energywise

We've just tried Cisco Energywise for a customer who had a large flat Layer 2 network across a Metropolitan area. We enabled Cisco Energywise on every switch across the network for future use with an IPT system, but we hit quite a big problem.

We couldn't quite identify which switch was doing it, but we placed 3 Energywise domains into the network and at least one of the switches then started to broadcast around 3Mbit/s of broadcast traffic onto the network. We had to turn off Energywise on all switches to get the issue to go away!

Switch IOS used was 2960 LAN Lite 52.SE2

Enable with caution - use sniffer traces to check for broadcast traffic through VLANs and check interface statistics to see if your counters are incrementing like mad!

Cisco CUCM 5 and 6 bug

The latest bug to hit my inbox is that apparently when CUCM 5 and 6 hits 248 days of uptime, it can crash horribly. Cisco's advice is to reboot the CUCM servers before they hit the 248 day uptime counter. Resetting them effectively resets the counter.

Very very worrying.

More issues with CallManager 6.0

I recently rolled out CallManager 6.0 for a customer and rather disappointingly we ended up having to apply an Engineering Special patch to fix the problems. Rather alarmingly, we found these bugs in version 6.0.1.3000-7:

• Attendant Console is unable to allow you to select a Device Profile (Unable to change MAC address) however Attendant Console works fine when you choose to use a phone that is statically configured rather than using Extension Mobility.
• Adding a new Device Profile to CallManager causes ccm.exe (or the Linux equivalant at least) to hang. Symptoms include CFWD state unchangeable, and attempting to log in/out of Extension Mobility causes the phone to endlessly say 'registering'.
• Device profile Service URL is being overwritten by the actual devices' SURL. The symptom presents itself as the service URL that was being shown on the phone when the phone is EM logged out can still be seen when the phone has been logged into EM.

What's disappointing is that all three of these bugs were fixed in previous versions of CallManager 6, and somehow Cisco has allowed these bugs to get through to a later version. Does it have something to say about their Quality Control procedures???

Anyway. These bugs are all fixed in ES UCOS_ES_6.0.1.3103-1 or CallManager 6.1. Speak to Cisco TAC for further assistance.