GermanUCgeek

Cisco Spark and its new released set of APIs  was one of the main topics during the Cisco Collaboration Summit 2015 . The easiness of usage was a highlighted point during the presentations and piqued my natural curiosity. I'm a Cisco Spark fan since more than one year and I really like the idea to merge innovative Cloud based apps and on-prem equipment to provide new services. Besides the different Cisco Spark APIs, Cisco released also the OpenVuln API , which provides API based access to Cisco Security advisories. One my responsibitilies at work is the evaluation of impact of new security advisories for Telepresence solutions, working with security advisories is part of my regular work. So I was very interested in evaluating how the OpenVuln API could make my daily life easier. During the days before Christmas I got the time to meet old friends and we talked about the good old time during school with IRC chat rooms, bots and other tools we used in the past. After some b

Normally the holiday season becomes the time for looking back and to recap the ups and downs of the last year. One of my personal largest highlights last year was the Cisco Customer Connection Program. The Customer Connection Program or formerly Collaboration User Group is part of the Cisco Communities and is open for everybody. If you are Cisco employee, partner or customer, it does not matter you, you can just join the community. For me the Customer Connection Programm brings five large benefits to their members: - Briefings There are regular briefings and many topics are presented before they are officially announced,  sometimes even before the partners are getting these informations. And also the kind of the briefings are making them special for me. Everybody knows the normal Cisco webinars. Normally you come to the session, the presenter go through his slides and the only change for asking question is the Q&A function of WebEx.  The briefings in Customer

This how to is based on Python 3.4, a how to for for newer Python releases will follow. PyCrypt is not maintained anymore and other solution are recommended to use with newer Paramiko releases. An updated version can be found here . In my last post I described how to use Python and Paramiko to delete a CTL file from a Cisco SIP phone during a migration. In the preparation phase of the migration I was confronted with the challenge to install Python on a Windows server in our management environment without direct Internet access. To install Python and Paramiko you need the following packages on your Windows machine: Python installation package  3.4.3 PyCrypt installation package  2.61 Paramiko installation package   ecdsa installation package  0.13 The required installation pacakages for Python,  PyCrypt and Paramiko are easy to find compared to the ecdsa installation package. The versions I found using Google were not compatible with Paramiko. So I used the download l

Which Cisco UC engineer does not know the challenge when he runs a CUCM in mixed mode: How to remove a Certificate Trust List on a phone nobody has physical access to during a CUCM migration? The normal way like using the same security tokens on old and new CUCM is not possible. Sending somebody on site during the migration is also not possible. These limitations raised the need for an alternate solution. After some testing, I decided to create a small Python script. The final script connects via SSH to the phone and uses the test key functions of the Cisco SIP phone debug-mode to press the required phone buttons via command line interface. Main requirement is to enable SSH for phone on the CUCM and to configure a username and password for the SSH access. The following script is based on Python 3.4 and uses as additionally Paramiko for the possibility to connect via SSH to the Cisco IP phones. Besides Paramiko also the time class is required to implement some d

Some weeks ago I get the invitation to join the Collaboration Specialist Training from Cisco hold in the Cisco Office in Lisbon. 4 days full of sessions and labs around the different Cisco collaboration products. The combination of the attractive city of Lisbon together with a great agenda around Collaboration Meeting Rooms (On-Prem, Hybrid and Cloud), Cisco Endpoints,Jabber and Cisco Spark sounded very interesting to me. Journey: Because of the training start on Tueday morning 8:30 am I took the late flight on Monday from Munich to Lisbon.  The flight across Lisbon was the first great moment on that trip and increased anticipation to 4 days full of learning and networking. The arrival to Lisbon shortly before midnight was already impressive and a very good start into the week. After the arrival I tried to get a taxi to my Hotel and was completely surprised that Uber was working great  (since the Partner Training ealier this year I'm a real Uber fan). After my

During my first thoughts about the topics I want to write about in my blog was very sure to focus on my passion, UC environments. But during the last days I had the possibility to join an internal workshop with lots of different topics. One of the topics "What's your brand? What do you want to represent?" They showed us lots of different examples like Apple, Coca Cola, Daimler or Samsung and asked us which attributes we link to these companies. Like innovative, luxery, etc.. At the end they ask us to chose a company which describes us the best. We all chose some of the well known companies to show that we are innovative, powerful or globally known. Yesterday on may way home it get session back in mind and also heard some news how disruptive the business of today is and how established companies have to change to survive the new challengers the digitalization is creating. During the several traffic jams I really thought about which attributes will help me really in