Exchange 2010 / Lync

/rant

How did Microsoft manage to make Exchange 2010 such a pig?

Can you tell I'm a little frustrated? I'm trying to with with Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging to test out interoperability with sipXecs/openUC. I've been at this now for well over 2 days worth of time between installing and trying to get systems upgraded.

I'm trying to install Exchange 2010 SP1 at this point and the requirements are killing me. First off, stupid IE won't download anything on the 2008 R2 server so I have chrome installed on that box which works but you can't directly click on the pre-reqs in Microsoft's setup tool. The links don't come up correctly in Chrome. Ok, so I type them all in and get to the last one... Microsoft Speech Server Runtime. The freaking thing won't install because something else is in place. Well, MS in their wisdom upgraded another component that replaced this piece but the server needs this one installed in order to do the upgrade.

What happened to the nice simple days of Exchange 5.5? Man they've gone down hill with this product since then. At least 5.5 was manageable (even if the database puked once in a while, it was easy to fix).

I'm sure Lync will be much better to work with.... gack! No praise coming from this camp.

/rant

Disaster Recovery & sipXecs

Wrote a blog post on Disaster Recovery & sipXecs over at sipFoundry.org web site...

Disaster Recovery & sipXecs

Capture Traffic on your sipXecs Server

Just a quick note on capturing traffic directly on the sipXecs PBX.

Personally, I'm a network guy and I like to use Wireshark to evaluate network traffic. Sure SipViewer shows you what the PBX is seeing for SIP traffic, but I want it all...

To capture directly on the sipXecs server, use the following command:

sipXecs: tcpdump -n -s 0 -i any -w filename.cap

Then you'll be able to use winscp to copy the file to your PC and open it with wireshark.

sipXecs... the alternate build...

It's kind of like an alternate movie ending, or director's cut...

Douglas Hubler (aka, Lazyboy, aka, lazieburd) (Douglas' Blog) a long time sipXecs contributor and former Pingtel employee is offering up an alternative sipXecs build to the community build offered by Avaya.

Douglas has added back in some code that had 'disappeared' before 4.2.0 was released. Also, he is setting up build shop on the open suse build service which makes it easier to build for many other distributions. There are also some more builds for other distros than supported by the Avaya builds.

Basically the process to start using the new builds is to change your sipxecs.repo file and do a 'yum update'.

Backup your system and get the backup off of the PBX (the update does an in-place upgrade, but you can never be too safe).

Login to your sipXecs box as root and edit your sipxecs.repo file ('nano -w /etc/yum.repos.d/sipxecs.repo').

Comment out the existing sipXecs yum info with '#' in front of each line.

Add the following lines to the bottom of the repo:

[home_sipfoundry]

name=SIPfoundry sipXecs IP PBX Unified Communications Solution (CentOS_5)

type=rpm-md

baseurl=http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/sipfoundry/CentOS_5/

gpgcheck=0

gpgkey=http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/sipfoundry/CentOS_5/repodata/repomd.xml.key

enabled=1

The above is for a CentOS_5 distro... (ie., the sipXecs install from ISO). Check out http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/sipfoundry for other builds. Builds are currently available in 32 bit and 64 bit for:

• CentOS 5
• Fedora 10, 11, 12
• RHEL 5
• Suse Enterprise Linux 10 & 11
• openSuse 11.1 and 11.2

Once you have your .repo file setup properly, run a 'yum clean' and then a 'yum update' from the command line.

I rebooted my sipXecs box after the yum completed.

Big thanks to Douglas for the hard work he's putting in!

A little off-topic... ok, a lot off topic...

Just finished re-writing a configuration I built for a Proxy server.

Proxy servers are a great way to tighten up your network security. Point all your users at the proxy server in their browser settings and allow only the proxy server to go out to the Internet in your inside interface firewall rules.

This example is built on CentOS 5.4 and utilizes squid, dansguardian, clamav and webmin. Daily downloads of malware and various blacklists are included.

Here's the build doc: SetupProxyServer.pdf

Very low overhead for this box. I built it on a single processor virtual machine with 512 MB RAM and a 10 GB virtual drive.

Some things I'd like to add include logging of userid to make logging a little nicer than just by IP address.

sipXecs 4.0.4 to 4.2.0 upgrade notes and impressions

Upgrade Notes:

Installed 4.0.4 fresh from ISO (dev build 4.1.7 on my test system was trashed).
Added a user / tested.
Fixed sipxecs.repo file replacing all '5.2' mirror references with '5'. (see previous blog post)
Ran YUM update from command line (265 items to be installed / upgraded, 374 MB worth).
Rebooted server.
A little patience was required on my relatively slow lab machine (800 MHz, Xeon w/1GB of RAM)... web services came up after a couple minutes.

Impressions:

New login screen is a little bland w/o graphic image.

Background job listed as failed on first login (problem listed as File replication: sipxpage.properties).
Created a paging group and re-sent the server profile and paging seemed to come up properly.

New GUI is better? different? I wish the tabs were starting from the left instead of centered.

Domain aliases of system IP address and host name are added automatically.

New user portal is nicer. Can't seem to import GMail contacts.

Branch concept in place... need to test.

Still no live attendant option as part of Auto Attendant.

Special Mode Auto Attendant configuration prominently available on Auto Attendants page.

GUI is much more sluggish on my dog of a test system (800 MHz, Xeon w/1GB of RAM)... time to upgrade I guess :-)

NTP server config in GUI is a nice add.

Alarm SNMP MIB now available on Alarm Configuration screen.

Alarm groups are now available for different notifications to different users (now including SMS and SNMP notification methods)

Much more but that's all I have time for at the moment...

Upgrading from sipXecs 4.0.4 to 4.2.0

One note that went across the mailing list (in case you missed it...).

Important Note on Upgrading:

There is a bug in 4.0.4 that breaks upgrading from the web user

interface. Specifically, it disables to use of the CentOS

repositories during the upgrade, which causes some prerequisites

to be unavailable, which makes the upgrade fail. The bug has

been fixed in 4.2 (and a bunch of other improvements to the

upgrade interface have been made too).

The best way to avoid the problem is to just do the upgrade from

the command line. Modify your yum repository configuration to

point to the repo where the 4.2 version is, and run 'yum

update', and when it's done, reboot.

I'm working on testing a 4.0.4 to 4.2.0 upgrade now.

sipXecs Version 4.2 just released!

Al Campbell posted today on the sipfoundry web site that version 4.2 is officially released!

http://www.sipfoundry.org/component/content/article/54-sipxecs42.html

Using sipviewer on your PC for Windows guys

Get the following applications loaded to your PC:

• Putty (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html)
• WinSCP (http://winscp.net/eng/download.php)
• Java (http://www.java.com)
• sipviewer (http://sipxecssw.org/temp/sipXecs/sipviewer-install.jar)

Run Putty and WinSCP programs and login to your sipXecs server with each. Open sipviewer on your local machine.

With Putty go to /var/log/sipxpbx.

• cd /var/log/sipxpbx

Navigate to the same folder in WinSCP.

In the Putty window, run the following command if you want to clear your log files:

• logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.d/sipxchange

Try placing the call that you are attempting to diagnose.

From Putty run the following command to create a single log file with all of the sipXecs log files merged into one file:

• merge-logs

In WinSCP, refresh the right window directory display. In that directory will be the new file named merged.xml that was just created.

With WinSCP copy the merged.xml file to your local hard drive and open it with sipviewer. You should be able to see a diagram of what your call did (according to sipXecs).

For more information on sipviewer see the Wiki page: http://wiki.sipfoundry.org/display/xecsuserV4r0/Display+SIP+message+flow+using+Sipviewer

Mount USB Key for sipXecs Backups

Ok, so you don't want to bother setting up an FTP server to store backups of your sipXecs system. Here's how to mount a USB Key to your backup folder.

Most USB keys will setup SCSI drive device (in my case it was /dev/sda1). Plug in a USB key and check out the /var/log/messages file to see what device was created.

You'll want to get a little program installed on your system called 'scsiadd'. This allows you to remove USB scsi devices from the system without causing them damage. It's available here: http://llg.cubic.org/tools/

The following assumes you are logged into the system as root...

Add required packages:
yum install lsscsi

If you don't have development tools on your sipXecs system yet, add them:
yum install gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel

Download, build and install scsiadd:
cd $HOME
mkdir scsiadd
cd scsiadd
wget http://llg.cubic.org/tools/scsiadd-1.97.tar.gz
tar -xf scsiadd-1.97.tar.gz
cd scsiadd-1.97
./configure
make install


Command line options:
scsiadd 1.97 - add and remove devices from the scsi subsystem
---------------------------------------------------------------
syntax: scsiadd {-a|-r}
scsiadd {-a|-r}
scsiadd {-a|-r}
scsiadd {-a|-r}
scsiadd [-i maxid] -s
scsiadd [-i maxid] -s
scsiadd -p
parameters not given are assumed 0
-a: add a device (default if no command given)
-r: remove device
-s: scan for devices
-p: print scsi status
-h: print this help message
-i: maximum SCSI ID which is scanned

Here's a good blog article on using scsiadd: http://blog.shadypixel.com/safely-removing-external-drives-in-linux/

Essentially, to remove a scsi device while the system is running, first find the device with lsscsi and then use scsiadd -r to remove it...

[root@sipx scsiadd-1.97]# lsscsi
[3:0:0:0] disk CBM USB 2.0 5.00 /dev/sdb
[root@sipx scsiadd-1.97]# scsiadd -r 3
could not remove device 0 0 3 0 : No such device or address
[root@sipx scsiadd-1.97]# scsiadd -r 3 0 0 0
[root@sipx scsiadd-1.97]#

Ok, now let's get to making the USB work:

Convert your USB drive from FAT16 or whatever it is to ext3:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1

Modify /etc/fstab:

nano -w /etc/fstab

Add the following line at the bottom:

/dev/sda1 /var/sipxdata/backup vfat auto,user,rw,sync 0 0

Test your fstab file now:

mount -a

And check to see that it is mounted:

mount

Change ownership on backup folder:

chown -R sipxchange:sipxchange /var/sipxdata/backup

Perform a test backup from the GUI.