IT Knowledge Share

ThousandEyes quick review – Jan 2023

2023-01-11T11:11:00.000-05:00

What is ThousandEyes? How can it help an IT pro do his/her job better and where can it be used?

TE is a monitoring platform, which is cloud based (SaaS). It has an extensive network of probes, in many service providers, and on TE/cisco’s own infrastructure. Organizations can also run probes in their own environment, onprem and in the cloud, to add additional points of monitoring. The customer probes are called ‘Enterprise Agents’ and can run on various platforms.

This service is somewhat similar to a large botnet, completely public and intentional, with the TE service running it and telling its many monitoring agents (bots) what to do, based on customer needs and config. It’s the good monitoring botnet, where you pay to join (subscription) and allocate resources to help monitor. Not like the bad kind of botnet who steals your resources and use them to do bad stuff.

Use cases for it include an online store that wants to be alerted if customers are experiencing long response times on its site, before the customers actually complain (proactive alerts). Or an enterprise that wants to know if their AWS instance is providing the contracted performance.

Another use case is a large service provider that has slow connection to one of its customers and need a way to ‘prove’ it to the last mile connection operator or to the customer, so they are not blamed for the bad performance.

In all of those test cases, TE will also show additional info about how the traffic gets from source to target and can potentially help identify bottle necks.

Traditional network management is limited to the perimeter of the enterprise network, it doesn’t have the ability to monitor cloud services or internet based performance. TE provides a tool to overcome that limitation.

Here are some screenshots from the interface:

Dashboard overview of all the configured tests

BGP path visualization between multiple points and cisco webex

Zoom-in on one of the connections

Thank you, IT KnowledgeShare 2023 (c)

Linksys wireless router config for bridge mode

2012-08-08T23:42:00.002-04:00

This is a follow up to my previous post WiFi Router Problems - How to Improve home wireless connection .

In it I will describe how to setup a Linksys E2500 wireless router to provide 5GHZ options to wifi routers that don't support this option (like the Verizon FiOS router (Actiontec MI424WR) .

Don't plug it right away to your existing router since it will probably conflict with it, instead connect it to the power and let is load.

After about 4-5 minutes, the router should be up and running and you should plug your computer's network cable to one of the wired ports. We are going to make changed on the wireless and therefor need to be connected with a network cable, otherwise our link would drop.

Once connected, you should get an IP address from the router and the default gateway would be the linksys, you can use ipconfig to figure out the default gateway address.

Open a web browser and point it to the address, a login prompt should appear and the default credentials would be username: admin with blank password.

Once logged in you want to do the following things:

Configure the E2500 to act as a wireless bridge (aka access point mode).

Configure an IP address to the router that does not conflict with your existing wifi router.
Disable the 2.4 GHZ service on the Linksys, we are going to use it for 5GHZ only.
Define the 5GHZ wireless parameters and security.
Define a password for the admin account.
Once those steps are completed, you can connect your E2500 to the provider router (FiOS) and start using the 5GHZ SSID.

Here are some relevant screen shots for the various steps, fields that are highlighted in yellow should be configured:

This image is for the ip address config and the Bridge mode.

You should probably name the 5 GHZ SSID with a name that has 5 at the end, so it's easy to identify.

Wireless security is very important, use WPA2 and set a long passphrase with letters and numbers.

Finally, don't forget to change you admin password, otherwise you can be hacked in no time.

thats it, save, plug to the provider router using a network cable and you should have the 5GHZ SSID available to you.

WiFi Router Problems - How to Improve home wireless connection

2012-07-04T23:14:00.001-04:00

If you live in a densely populated area, where many of your neighbors use WiFi, and your connection keeps dropping, or it is intermittent and unstable, there is a solution for you.

The issues that this post will address are related to wireless (or WiFi) instability, frequent disconnects, network issues which are mainly affecting iPad and are bringing the "no internet connection" error message.

Wireless or WiFi is a communication protocol that is defined under a standard called 802.11 , this standard is using two main frequencies to transmit over the air, 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz.

Under the sub standard called 802.11g, which is the most common protocol in residential networks these days, the transmission is being done using the 2.4GHZ method. The problem is that this frequency only allow 11 channels for the entire spectrum and only three usable (non overlapping).

In short, a WiFi user can only use channels 1, 6 or 11 in the United States, based on the current standards. As long as there are only three wireless routers around, that's not a problem, since every router can use one of the channels and no conflict will be happening.
If there are more than three routers around, channels need to be shared and in a high share environment, devices will disconnect from the router.

How can you tell if this is the reason to your disconnects, check how many available wireless networks are showing up when you enter the network settings and if you see more than five, there is a good chance that this is your problem.

Here is a snip of what I see in my windows 7 wireless network connections window (network names were deleted for privacy):

This exact thing was happening to me and was mostly experienced while using the ipad, where the ipad would constantly disconnect from the network and display the 'choose a network' dialog.

What can you do? there is a solution for that, use a wireless protocol that operates in the 5 GHz frequency. Why would it matter? because 5 GHz gives you twenty more channels to use (total of twenty three) and reduces the potential channel clogging that happens in the 2.4 GHz spectrum. The wireless protocol that can be used to take advantage of this is the 802.11n.

The 802.11n can work on either 2.4 or 5 GHz and it is the most recent standardized WiFi protocol (until 802.11ac gets approved). In order to use 802.11n over the 5 GHz frequency, you need a special router that can provide this functionality.

If you are already an owner of that sort of wireless router, all you need to do is use the SSID for the 5 GHz and your issues should stop, if not you need to purchase a router that can provide this functionality.

The device I purchased for that purpose is the Cisco/Linksys E2500 router:

Other routers that are dual band can also provide that functionality, but from my experience this specific router did the job.

Once the router is available, it can either replace your existing WiFi router, or if you have a router that is also a cable modem (has a coax cable connected to it, like the Verizon FiOS router), you can configure it to act as an access point by selecting the Bridge Mode in the 'internet connection' settings and plugging it to the back of your router.

That's it for this post, if you find it helpful but need more details about how to setup the router, comment below and I'll answer or create another post with more details.

*** Update: here is a link to a post about how to configure the linksys ruter for bridge mode Linksys wireless router config for bridge mode

Controlling the CCX script flow based on time and date variables

2011-12-27T10:48:00.001-05:00

This post is the second of two that are dedicated to Cisco unified contact center express (UCCXor CCX) scripting. In this one I'll explain how variables can be used for time/date based script control. The first post can be found here. This example was created with a CCX system integrated with Cisco Unified Communication Manager (CUCM) also known as Cisco CallManager.

A common things to do in a UCCX script is to present different option to callers based on the time they are calling. If it's after hours, they should be getting a closed message and the same goes for holidays. Creating a static script behavior that is based on the "time of day" and "day of week" general steps is one way to do that, but it requires script editing whenever there is a change and it requires a script per customer in multiple queue scenario.
Another option is to act based on a database or XML file query, both are valid but require deeper programming skills and premium licensing (for the SQL query option).

There is another option that I have recently used and would like to discuss here. With this option a date variable is defined in the script and compared to other variables (which are also parameters) and the script behavior is determined based on those comparisons. By using parameters, the open/closed hours can be controlled outside of the script from the CCX appadmin interface.

To further explain here is how this can be implemented in order to check for a weekend day and act differently if this is a weekend day.
First define a date variable and call it currentDayTime, make sure it is initialized as D[now] which means it will be set to the current CCX server system time.

This is how it will look in script editor:

Now define two integer variables and set them to be a parameter, those would be used to configure the weekend days. The variables are initialized in the script to 1 and 7 which correspond to Sunday and Saturday, but this can be adjusted to other days since it's a parameter.
The relevant lines in the script editor would look like the following:

In the uccx script use an IF condition to check if the current day is a weekend day and define what to do based on the comparison. Here is how the IF condition would look like:

The xxx.dow method in a date variable represent the day of week in a numeric value of 1 through 7. This IF can be nested to check for public holidays and more variables/parameters for additional functionality. In order to check for the current hour, use the xxx.hod method, which represent the hour of the day in 0 through 23 values.

Clear as mud, right? :)

Comment if you have questions and I'll be happy to explain.

CCX programming variables and parameters

2011-12-23T12:30:00.001-05:00

This is the first of two posts I'm going to dedicate to Contact Center Express programming. This one is going to discuss a fundamental aspect of CCX scripting: variables and variables that are parameters. The second post can be found here. This example was created with a CCX system integrated with Cisco Unified Communication Manager (CUCM) also known as Cisco CallManager.

This is a basic topic in programming and advanced CCX scripters would probably find it boring, but I'm going to cover it anyway :)

A variable is a memory address which store information that a program is using during its operation, and within a script it can be used to store things like calling number, hour, date and the name of a .wav file to be played. CCX supports many variable types, integers, strings and more.

When a variable is defined as a parameter, the system administrator would have the option to define it outside of the script editor. This is an important functionality because it allows the creation of a generic script that can be used in many situations.

Lets look at an example, the following image shows a script that plays a prompt based on a comparison of the current hour with an integer variable called openHour:

When this script is configure to be an application in CCX admin, the screen will look like the following:

As can be seen, the openHour variable is internal to the application and the administrator cant change its value without editing the script.

In the next example, the exact same script is shown but with the variable configured to be a parameter:

This will change the application config screen to look like the following:

As can be seen, the openHour variable is now exposed to the system admin and can be changed from the CCX admin interface for things like holiday schedule (late opening hour) or temporary extended hours (holiday season shopping support). The grayed out 0 is going to be used as the variable initial value unless the check box near the parameter is selected and a different value is entered in the content field.

The following screen capture shows how the non default screen would look like, as can be seen, the application is smart enough to tell us its an integer type of variable.

That's it on this topic, the next post will be based on this post and expand on date and time based parameters and variables.

Introduction to IT Knowledge Share

2011-11-26T17:31:00.001-05:00

Hello,

Information Technology (IT) Knowledge Share is a place I'll use to share many things, mostly related to Information Technology.
As an experienced IT person and a geek, I spend a lot of time researching problems on the internet and in real world/lab environment. When a solution is found, and tested, I enjoy sharing it.

My areas of expertise are mostly around Cisco (Collaboration/UC, Networks, Security) but I know stuff about many other vendors and general networking concepts.

As a compulsive troubleshooter and technology assessor, I'm open to questions and assessment requests. Questions from readers who need help and don't mind me blogging about it and assessments of products from vendors that are open to their product being dissected in the blog.

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