Random marketing calls

 Humor  No Responses »
Jun 302008
 

“Hello, is this <insert name here>?”

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“My name is <insert another name here> and I’m calling from <insert organization name here> and I need to advise you that this call may be monitored for quality and training purposes.”

“What if I don’t want that?”

“What?”

“What if I don’t want you to record me?”

“I’m sorry, one moment.”  Puts me on hold, then comes back.  “I need to advise you that this call is being monitored for quality and training pur—.”

“Yes, but what if I don’t want you to record me?”

“Then we can’t continue, thank you for your past patronage, have a nice day.”

Such a nicer way of dealing with the marketers.

 Posted by John Williams at 8:47 am

TIP: CS1000 Signaling Server & cslogin

 Nortel  No Responses »
Jun 262008
 

If you telnet to your signaling server, you can use cslogin to access your SL1 interface for your PBX.  To return to the oam prompt of your signaling server, enter tilde period (~.) from the SL1 interface.

  • telnet <ip address>
  • login <username>
  • password <password>
  • oam> cslogin
  • OVL111
    >~.
  • oam>

 Posted by John Williams at 10:37 am

Blogs at work

 Work  No Responses »
Jun 252008
 

As with my last job, I have implemented a PHP Blog (WordPress) at work.  Unlike my last job, this employer has embraced deployment of the blog as customer facing.

Take an early look at my new work blog: Vox Technical Support Headlines.

 Posted by John Williams at 11:45 am

TIP: Nortel CS1000 Security

 Nortel  No Responses »
Jun 242008
 

I’ve got a whole article I’m writing on how to secure a CS1000 (although, not for public distribution), but the fact of the matter is that there are some very simple things that people can do to keep a better watch on what is done in their system.  One of the things that can be done is implementing the Audit log.

>ld 22
PT2000

REQ  prt
TYPE pwd
PWD2

PWD
.

.

.

  AUDT YES
  SIZE 50
.

.

.

 This combined with the MULTI_USER prompt in LD 17 OVLY data gives you a lot of data about users who enter your system and perform tasks;

REQ  prt
TYPE ovly

OVLY
.

.

.

  MULTI_USER ON

The audit log is located in the LD 17 PWD datablock and provides a way of tracking which user account logs in, which interface they connect with and what management overlays they use while logged in.

REQ  prt
TYPE audt
LOG TTY #00  11:08  ADMIN2 PWD2  022

You can also modify the TTYLOG prompt on LD 17 ADAN HST and LD 17 ADAN TTY to capture other kinds of information.

The MULTI_USER prompt is very important because setting all users up with individual accounts allows you to perform auditing of what each user does.  Restricting all users except the super users (your engineer level users) from accessing LD 17 will also prevent them from modifying your logging settings.  A standard Telecom Analyst has no need to access LD 17, although you might give them LD 22 to be able to print any of the configuration information from LD 17.

 Posted by John Williams at 10:11 am

Nortel Tips from the Archive

 Nortel  No Responses »
Jun 212008
 

One of the things that I’m occassionally asked (but never personally implemented) is:

“How do I forward my desk number at work to some other location when I’m not ask my desk?”

Enter Kris Guntzelman (who originally gave me the answer)

The feature you are looking for is indeed Remote Call Forwarding.  The FFC
(in LD 57) is RCFA (for activate) and RCFD (for deactivate).

HOWEVER, the set you are attempting to activate/deactivate the feature on
MUST have a Station Control Password (SCPW) programmed or else the system
won’t let you do it.

What I’ve got set up here is a DISA line that has an NCOS of 0 and is TLD
(that way the DISA can’t be exploited).  Once you dial in and you enter your
DISA password, you enter the FFC for RCFA, then the SCPW of the station you
wish to program, then the PRIME DN of that same phone.  You should now get
hit with stutter dialtone.  If you hit # now, the phone will be forwarded to
its last destination, otherwise enter the number (9 first if necessary) then
# when finished.

RCF follows all the same rules as regular CFW.  If your phone doesn’t have a
high enough NCOS to make the call w/o an acct code, it won’t work.

Of course, this is a toll fraud risk if not properly monitored and policed.  DISA as a whole is dangerous.  DISA (in this case) stands for Direct Inward System Access and is a means of providing remote users the ability to call in to your phone system and receive dial tone, which permits them to call another number (or an internal number) freely as if they were on your system.  The security you set on your DISA feature (TLD and NCOS 0 suggested above) determines what off-net dialing capabilities the DISA user will have.

Some companies provide a toll free number and a DISA access code to their remote/traveling users to permit them to use the company’s phone system to make long distance calls rather than acquiring calling cards or paying for cellphone roaming charges.  This was much more common in the last decade (or decade before that) when long distance costs were higher on cell or calling cards than it was to purchase a toll free number and pay for both the toll free and long distance charges from a central location.

Still, a worthwhile memorandum for the archives.

 Posted by John Williams at 7:25 am

Nortel CS1000 Hardware Version table (made simple)

 Nortel  No Responses »
Jun 172008
 

Got to love the “business made simple” marketing strategy of Nortel, but what lurks behind that marketing strategy?  Decades of excellent architecture with one of the most consistant (some might say archaic) command line interfaces known to man.

With the recent (as in last few years) renaming of the traditional “Meridian-1 Option” line of enterprise phone systems to Communication Server 1000, there comes a few new, confusing names to the Nortel playground.  Half group, Single group, Multi group, Cabinet, Chassis.

Making sense of this is what I do, so I whipped up this handy cheat sheet on all of the versions I know of or could find in the documentation, and a quick tutorial on how to identify system hardware with a few quick commands in the CLI.

 Voila! My Nortel CS1000 Hardware Version bulletin.

  •   Meridian-1 / CS1000 Hardware Version Lookup Table [DRN08061701] (33.7 KiB, 586 hits)
    You need to be a registered user to download this file.

 Posted by John Williams at 1:02 pm

Tivo

 TV & Movies  No Responses »
Jun 122008
 

Three days ago I received my brand new Tivo Series3 HD DVR.  On the day it arrived, I made a very disappointing discovery.  The Series3 HD DVR does not connect to a cable digital receiver, you have to get a CableCard from the cable provider to connect the DVR directly to the cable connection on the wall.

This means that I couldn’t use my DVR until I went out and got a CableCard, and since I didn’t get my Tivo from UPS shipping until around 5 PM, I had maybe 10 minutes to make a 12 minute trip to collect one that evening.  So, on to the next task of getting the Tivo through Guided Setup and connected to my wireless network using 802.11g and WPA-PSK encryption. (That’s Wi-Fi Protected Access – Pre-Shared Key to non-technical folks… which means that my wireless signal is encrypted with a passphrase that I pre-share between the wireless access point and the client device, like the Tivo box.)

So I hook up this fancy Tivo Wireless G, USB antenna, only to discover that it won’t work.  It keeps insisting that I must use WEP, which I don’t like because it’s less secure than WPA, but I decide, ok, I’ll go WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy, another Wi-Fi encryption scheme) and use an access list to prevent unauthorized MAC addresses from connecting to my access point.  Except that it won’t work.

Why won’t it work, you ask, as confused as I was at first.  After all, the Wireless USB antenna is from Tivo, the DVR is from Tivo, this should work, right?  Wrong.  Tivo didn’t start supporting the G band wireless signal (even on their own antennas) until software version 8.1, and quite coincidentally, the Series3 DVR that I receive has 8.0.1.  So I cannot get the antenna to work properly with WPA or 802.11g, and I’m having no luck getting WEP to work properly with anything (not even my laptop.)

After several hours of reading through the Tivo online support and browsing the internet, I realize that 8.1 is the fix for the problem, but in order to get 8.1, I have to connect the Tivo to the network.  So I hunt up enough CAT5 cable to string a run from my modem to the Tivo box on the other side of the house (50+ feet of CAT5 cable, strung from upstairs on one end of my house to downstairs on the other end of my house.)  Except that the 50 foot CAT5 cable I have has some loose copper pairs within the RJ45 jack, which means that the signal goes out if you twist the cable just so…

Naturally by now, I’m having lots of fun.

Once I finally get the Tivo on to the network, I discover that Tivo will not permit me to download the latest software (to even get myself on to the wireless, so that I can finish the configuration of the stupid device) until after I register and pay for service from Tivo.  So now I’m forking out money for a product that doesn’t work, in the hopes that the 8.1 software upgrade will allow the device to work over my wireless, so that later I can  go to the cable company and pick up a CableCard to only then get the Tivo connected to the cable feed and start watching TV on it.

As it happens, 9.3a is the current software release.  According to information I dug up 8.1 was released in 2006.  Which means that in the last 1.5 years, no one has bothered to upgrade the Tivo device that I purchased (or it was intentionally manufactured with non-current release software on it.)

As it also happens, 9.3a works well with my wireless access point using 802.11g and WPA-PSK.  It even can be further secured by adding the MAC address of my Tivo wireless adapter to the access list (thus preventing unexpected guests from hacking my wireless network and having access to my computers, tivo, bandwidth, etc.)

So, now I have a working Tivo unit (4 hours later) but still no cable card.

Day 2 (day after I received my Tivo DVR) I go to the cable company, and through a series of misfortunes, it takes another 4 hours to get the cable company to pair the CableCard with my account…  during this time I have access to almost no channels, and I discover that the CableCard will not support On Demand functionality, so if I want to use On Demand I must keep the cable company’s digital receiver (an additional monthly charge from the cable company to have both the receiver plus a CableCard.)

Many hours poorer and a few dollars lighter than I expected, I finally got my Tivo Series3 HD DVR operational.  In the end, only 1 feature makes Tivo more attractive than sticking with the cable company’s combination DVR/digital receiver.

  1. Tivo allows you to export your recorded programs to your PC for storage & later viewing (both on your PC and by pushing it back to the DVR, and the upgraded PC application permits you to convert the recorded program to a format compatible with your iPod)

After 8 hours, and significantly more cost…  I’m not sure that it was worth getting the Tivo Series3 HD DVR.  Basically I paid close to $1000 to be able to back up recorded programs…  For a lot less, I could have got a cable combo DVR/receiver and just bought 500 movies (at $20 each).

I’m feeling ripped off.

 Posted by John Williams at 8:00 am

Upcoming books

 Books  No Responses »
Jun 112008
 

Locus Online provides an excellent list of upcoming books in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genre.  Some of the books I most anticipate are:

  • By Schizm Rent Asunder, by David Weber
  • A Dance With Dragons, by George R R Martin
  • Cyteen II: Regenesis, by CJ Cherryh
  • Wings of Wrath, by CS Friedman

 Some books I find myself curious about:

  • Storm from the Shadows, by David Weber
  • Busted Flush, edited by George R R Martin
  • Ender in Exile, Orson Scott Card

 Posted by John Williams at 8:00 am

End of an era

 Gaming  No Responses »
Jun 102008
 

My friends from back in the day when I played World of Warcraft have all finally disbanded.  They closed the forums in the last 48 hours and I just noticed.

While I don’t miss the game, I do miss the friendships that I’ve built over the years.  I wish you well in whatever endeavors you pursue, both personal and entertainment.  I hope you’ll stay in touch.

 Posted by John Williams at 4:49 pm

TIP: CS1000 4.0 Password Reset

 Nortel  No Responses »
Jun 042008
 

The password reset procedure on a CS1000 4.0 system indicates that you are required to provide the original install floppy disk. Attempting the password reset procedure without the original diskette will result in the system prompting you for the current PDT2 password. If you don’t have it, you’ll be forced to reload the software on all CPUs.

 Posted by John Williams at 7:38 am
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