Extending your MeetingPlace Express installation lifeline
Whilst I’m always in favour of migrating to the latest technology and taking advantage of the features they offer, every once in a while you have some existing installation that simply does the job and you are happy with what it offers.
We’ve had an old installation of Cisco MeetingPlace Express 2.1, which dates back to circa 2006/7, it offers conference call facilities, screen sharing and presentation, all nice and simple. It’s been replaced by the latest Cisco offering of WebEx. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great product, but we simply can’t justify the expense of it when the feature set we have now fulfils our needs. We’ve gone OSX on our desktop, and whilst MeetingPlace Express is strictly only supported under Windows, for the plugins etc, it’s perfectly useable from within the web based client. In order to use our existing install, we needed to make it use our backend Active Directory infrastructure and also change it to our current domain suffix, from a legacy one.
Initially, integrating it to Active Directory appeared daunting, as we had existing, stand alone users configured, with existing repeat meetings etc.
There is plenty of good documentation available here, but when we followed it, we managed to import users, but they were detached from their meetings, and as those meetings had no owners, they in turn vanished. This could have been a disaster, but we had of course made a full system backup before we did anything.
So, the aim was essentially 2 separate processes; change the DNS suffix and lookup; make the system AD integrated somehow.
In integrating MeetingPlace Express with an external directory, there are 2 methods to do it, LDAP and AXL SOAP API. They will both authenticate against CUCM or a CUCM related/generated directory. It pretty much depends which version of Call Manager (CUCM) you’re running, for 4.x and earlier, ldap is recommended and for 5.x and above, AXL is supported. As I wanted to authenticate against Active Directory and not CUCM, I opted to do it with ldap, it’s by far the simplest way.
The procedure is like this:
Export all users to csv text file.
Log in to Cisco Unified MeetingPlace Express and click Administration. Click System Configuration > Usage Configuration.
Complete the fields available
- Cisco Unified Communications Manager/ Cisco Unified CallManager version: Set this field to Cisco Unified CallManager Release 4.x
- LDAP URL: (Make sure that this URL starts with ldap) ldap://server.whateveryourdomain.com:389 (Make sure that there are no spaces after the URL)
- Directory username: Use the format of an LDAP distinguished name: cn=serviceaccount,dc=whateveryourdomain,dc=com
- Password: Self explanatory
- Cisco base: Leave blank if you are not using the Cisco Unified CallManager DC-Directory to authenticate Cisco Unified MeetingPlace Express users.
- User base: dc=whateveryourdomain,dc=com
- Directory type: ADS (Active Directory Services)
- Click Test LDAP Configuration to test that the configuration parameters work correctly.
- Click Save.
The test should dictate your success.
So, if like us you have existing users and want to convert them to AD authentication, you will need to take your exported file and modify it.
The procedure is like this:
1 Export all users again as before, safety first.
2 Open the file in Excel and then import as comer separated CSV
3 Edit text file, and modify field ISUSERLOCAL set to NO
4 Save the file, as csv, (however you cannot import using csv, the file MUST be text or it will corrupt on import)
5 Drop into a file manager and rename the file extension to .txt
6 Now import user TXT file and select the option to overwrite any existing users
7 Check you can now still login with AD credentials
8 Check meetings are all still visible. Test
Don’t change settings for admin users, or guest user as these must stay local.
You should not have all your users still with their existing meetings, but authenticating against Active Directory!
Now to change the domain suffix…
To change network parameters post installation, you can use the net command to modify the network configuration settings. To access the net command, you can use the Meeting Place terminal via the GUI, or SSH into it as the user called mpxadmin and then enter the command net.
In order to change the network settings, you must shut down the application by entering the following: sudo mpx_sys stop
The options pretty much speak for themselves, to change the DNS suffix, option 5; to change the DNS servers, option 6 and so on.
Option 8 when you’re done modifying settings, and don’t forget to reboot for the settings to take effect. (shutdown -r now)
With MeetingPlace now authenticating against your domain, any users who weren’t already enrolled will have accounts created on the fly when they attempt to login. It’s great, lowers the support overhead and is much quicker for the users too.
Microsoft Office 2011 and the Me contact
If you deploy Microsoft Office 2011 from a central repository and have your macbooks/mini’s/imac enrolled in Active Directory, you may find some puzzling results when your users send you emails.
When a new user signs into the macbook with his Active Directory credentials, his account is created on the fly (assuming you’ve deployed your topology to do so). At the same time your Outlook 2011 profile will set itself up with your email address, and providing your Exchange DNS records are configured correctly, all server addressing will be configured on the fly.
So, here’s the scenario, new (to the macbook) user signs into Outlook, all appears well, his mail is there, contacts etc. He or she sends an email to colleagues who receive an emails where the From: field appears fine, as in it shows their name.
However when you reply, you notice that the To: field derives a ‘Microsoft Office User’ preface to the full email address.
You get a result that looks like this:
From: Luke Darby <Luke@lukedarby.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:24:11 +0000
To: Microsoft Office User <lukedarby@lukedarby.co.uk>
Subject: RE: I have a name you know!
Initially this was a huge issue for us as it seemed to be linked to the “This product is licenced to” field. In short, it’s not directly related, but indirect.
Outlook 2011 creates a contact for you when you first create a profile, called ‘Me’ If it doesn’t have all information available, it uses your email address and the licences to field. In Essence you get a ‘Me’ contact which has ‘Microsoft Office User’ as the contact First and Last Name and your Work E-mail completed with your primary SMTP alias.
Me contact
You find this contact by clicking on Contacts -> Organize -> Me
Outlook Me contact
Once in there, you can manually complete the details you want, OR….
Scroll down and you should see your AD Directory contact detail. A handy ‘Update Contact’ button is provided for convenience to fill all the fields for you.
Once done, restart Outlook for good measure and you won’t see the issue again. It’s annoying, but simple to solve, and the user can do it themselves.
If you gave the bulk distribution licences to name as something else, then you’ll need to change THAT name in your Me contact.
Communicator 2011 13.1.2 Release – Lion patch at last
As many of you who have upgraded to Lion in either beta, GM (Gold Master seed) or the release version will know, if you were/are running Communicator 2011 and patched it under Snow Leopard to anything other than 13.0.0 (release version) then you’ll know it crashes as soon as you message someone (or they message you) once you were running Lion.
The ‘solution’ to this was to roll back to 13.0.0 which is pretty messy to be honest, and with Lion having been around for a while most of us expected the patch to have followed the release VERY closely.
Anyway, all that said, Microsoft have released the patch, download it here.
However take note of the kb, pre reqs:Before you install the Communicator 2011 13.1.2 Update, make sure that the computer is running Mac OS X v10.5.8 or a later version of the Mac OS X operating system.
In other words, if you’re running the pre-release, GM or the full release, AND have regressed your Communicator 2011 install to 13.0.0 then the upgrade won’t work. A neat guideline is that if Microsoft Autoupdate doesn’t ‘find’ it, then you’ll get an install error like this
Thanks for the image Nick!
This is pre-release btw. To resolve this error make sure you install the ‘broken’ 13.1.x version update first, THEN the patch will install.
This is made clear in the KB : Additionally, you must install Microsoft Communicator for Mac 13.1.0 Update or a later update before you install the Communicator for Mac 13.1.2 Update.
Successful install of Communicator2011-13.1.2
So to recap, the patch will install on pretty much any version of Lion or Snow Leopard(tested), but you must have patched Communicator to 13.1.0 minimum for it to install. If you regressed your install to 13.0.0, then patch it again, THEN install 13.1.2. Easy way to do this is let AutoUpdate work for you.
Anyway good news for a lot of folk who have put their money into Communicator/Lync etc, justifying the spend on these products is tough enough without having to explain to CEO’s that you’re waiting for a patch and have to roll them back to an inferior version (no screen share, EDGE etc)
Oh and connecting via EDGE … If you’re running Snow Leopard it still works with 13.1.2… Currently testing it on Lion, I’ve had 2 successes and 1 fail, so far I’m going with it still works! good news.
I know it’s life on the leading edge, but still, come on Microsoft, keep up!
Latest Jetstress Field Guide
I’ve always relied on JetStress to gain confidence in any new Exchange infrastructure I build. It gives you good loading feedback and is great for benchmarking disk I/O and IOPS.
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Jetstress-Field-Guide-1602d64c
According to the Exchange Team, the highlights are:
Updated for version 14.01.225.017 of Jetstress
Added Exchange Server 2003 instructions
Added more troubleshooting information
Added guidance for running Jetstress on a production Exchange Server
Included guidance for testing Raid Arrays
Included information and guidance on Background Database Maintenance
General corrections and clarity improvements
If you’re building or are about to build an Exchange setup, it’ worth a good read. Use it.
Storage market continuous change
The storage market has to be the most unsettled it’s been in years. The wide variety of storage vendors, with good independents is a shrinking landscape. The power plays and buy outs makes for some very careful decisions if you’re about to buy storage. My short advice is be careful and if you can..wait it out.
I guess the start for me was Sun buying Storagetek, that was back in 2005, but I mark it as one of the very early indicators of change. However after that, things appeared settled, but as a Storagetek customer, there was a shift from what felt like a more intimate organisation in Storagetek, to a very rigid feeling environment within Sun. The irony of that was even further bureaucracy and rigidity was to come in 2009 when Oracle purchased Sun.
I guess I was pretty close to both these acquisitions as I was a Storagetek customer throughout. As a customer I felt the changes quite severely. When using Storagetek for support, I felt like I could reach into the heart of the organisation to get advice or help, with Sun, those portals closed, things became very regimented, almost certainly better for a company with scale, but as a customer it was sometimes frustrating.
With Dell continuing to resell EMC, they didn’t have that storage piece they could call their own. Dell had long since been in the server space, if you didn’t buy HP/Compaq, you bought Dell tin. They went shopping and Dell bought Equallogic.
This of course soured their relationship with EMC for a while, but it seemed to more or less heal. My thoughts are here on that. Equallogic was a move away from the traditional frame based FC type SAN, with it’s iSCSI technology. It was an expensive purchase, (to put it mildly) the largest ever cash purchase of a private venture backed technology company! That said they’ve made it work for them, a very established and profitable product line now.
HP, not to be outdone, realising the changing and growing storage space, go out and acquire Lefthand Networks, who are pretty much an Equallogic competitor. Interesting in that it’s a like for like purchase, and really only touching the Enterprise level market. Lefthand a heavy iSCSI pioneer.
Oracle purchasing Sun posed many questions, with a lot of speculation that they would drop the storage, they only purchased MySQL. At the time I maintained the storage piece had value as Oracle DB turn key solutions, and low and behold that’s exactly what they’re offering now, tuned storage to create a harmony between software and hardware.
Dell, had hoped to sew up their Entry/Mid/Enterprise solution with the Equallogic and clearly with designs on 3Par products in mind went shopping and made a very interesting purchase by purchasing a storage technology company called Ocarina. They’re a dedupe/storage optimisation technology. This signalled their intention to invest further in their storage offering and continue to innovate.
In the same month IBM announced the acquisition of Storwize a data compression specialist. One can only assume they have the intention of offering it as part of their product suite.
Along comes HP, predominantly a server, printer and desktop tin vendor, they had the EVA storage solution, it had issues and was becoming a bit of a dinosaur in a rapidly changing storage technology market. The LeftHand acquisition had put them in a good place, and for a while were the all round vendor. If you went to HP, it was pretty much a 1 stop shop. However the EVA was ageing, Lefthand wasn’t making inroads into the heavy enterprise user markets, they lacked mid to enterprise punch, a storage piece that would move them on to next generation technology. A bidding war ensued between Dell and HP for the independent 3Par. 3Par had great technology, an excellent reputation and was perceived as a fantastic purchase by both HP and Dell. HP won out. Some say they paid way over the odds, probably, but they were ahead in the race!
Ironically I don’t feel HP are pushing the 3Par sales very hard, I suspect it’s because it just doesn’t integrate into their Storageworks management platform, and that’s a piece of development that is ongoing. Just take a walk around their website, it’s all Lefthand P-series and EVA, 3Par seems to exist as a separate entity. Try and engage HP about 3Par products, you’ll see what I mean.
Step into 2011 and events occur at pace.
Dell expand their empire again. While Equallogic is a great product, it sits pretty much in the entry to mid level space, whereas they were filling Enterprise heavy orders with the EMC offerings. To take on that market themselves they needed that heavy hitter, they lost 3Par, so they went to their closest rival Compellent. The recession had meant that R&D for the smaller storage houses was slightly under funded, and of course made them ripe for purchase. Compellent has fantastic technology, a well respected support operation and has potential for scale and improvements. Compellent also makes a nice model for the Ocarina innovation. Dedupe in-line anyone?
Then the pace steps up!
Western Digital announces the acquisition of Hitachi disk arm. This is a very interesting purchase on many levels, clearly WD are making a play here to up the ante on Seagate, their closest rival. Hitachi parting with the disk arm is curious, they’re a storage array vendor themselves and part of their sales pitch is that they make the array end to end.. well, not anymore! Odd. That puts question marks over Hitachi HDS, are they ripe for acquisition?
Confused by that, NetApp announces their acquisition of the the LSI storage arm, Engenio. This is HUGE news. Underneath a plethora of arrays, sits LSI tech. Oracle’s 6000 series, IBM DS and FastT to me are the big fish. NetApp and Oracle compete for the same business in that market, Oracle aren’t going to want to buy from NetApp – NetApp aren’t going to want to sell to Oracle or indeed IBM, they want that business for themselves! The PR on this is that all is well, OEM relationships are safe… yeah, ok. This is business and big money. At present I can only see the end of the line for those big ticket OEM ranges. This one change puts huge question marks over further investment in those technologies, and without committed re-assurance from all parties, to my mind it’s time for change!
Next thing we know Seagate upsize to catch WD, and acquire Samsungs disk arm!
To emphasise the pace at which events occur, I’ve put together this timeline.
This isn’t exhaustive by any means, little twists and turns have come and gone, but for me these were the ones that had knock forward effect and therefor the most impact.
What next?! Rumour and prediction collide…
Cisco buy NetApp: Well, Cisco are desperate to get a slice of the storage/server market, they’re largely regarded as a 1 trick pony, king of networking. They do an AWFUL lot of collaboration with NetApp… feels like only a matter of time.
Oracle dump Hitachi and LSI/Engenio: they aren’t going to want to buy from the competition, they either buy them or drop them.
Oracle buy NetApp: They have a choice to make, dig deep and buy NetApp, which makes a lot of sense on many levels, but would be costly.
IBM buy NetApp: Similar reasons for Oracle to buy them, get back control or lose a chunk of their range
IBM buy EMC: This would also make sense for IBM, EMC has the enterprise (banking) marketplace very well sewn up and IBM has that sort of support operation to match.
Sometimes you HAVE to invest, and if you take the hard line that it’s strategic or an upgrade with an existing vendor relationship, you can’t go far wrong. Otherwise, it’s becoming a small storage vendor list, my advice, watch now, buy much later.
Luke Darby
Technology Infrastructure | Media | Communication | Broadcasting
United Kingdom
