Sadfully Estos ProCall and Estos MetaDirectory have neither an inbuilt backup functionality nor a scheduler to backup automatically.
After searching the web for a solution I found a German article about moving the service from one machine to another: Move Estos from one server to another
It describes the steps how you can create a backup of both applications and what you have to do to restore them on another machine. Continue reading
With the new IP Office release 10.1 Avaya added a new feature called ‘Multiple Appearance Directory Number’ or short ‘MADN’ to address some customer requests. While there had been the need to be reachable under more than one single number you had to find workarounds to manage that.
You had the opportunity to place one (ore more) cheap digital or IP phone in the data center and create bridged appearance keys for that phone. It was also possible to create a hunt group for the additional numbers. The hunt group solution had some disadvantages. Enabling call forwarding or DND (do not disturb) disabled the user’s membership within the group and the user wasn’t reachable anymore. The only way a user could be reached anyway was to dial a short code using the function ‘Dial extension by number’. That works as long as the user doesn’t use hot desking because the function does not call the logged in user but the phone itself.
So we want to be able to call a user through an extra number even if his phone is forwarded or he is in a call. I had a use case where an alarm server had to call the user to play an important voice message in case of a technical issue or in different alarm scenarios like fire or violence. It is important that the alarm server is able to call the user even if his phone is not available for any reason. Continue reading
Starting with IP Office release 10 Avaya added the ability to connect One-X Portal to a Server Edition solution through a single connection rather than to add every single node manually. That makes administration much easier and you don’t have to worry about forgetting to add new connections within One-X Portal if your customer needs further nodes. But this enhancement made me struggling almost a full day in a none Server Edition environment.
Up to release 9.1 you had to add every single node of a Server Edition Solution as CSTA provider and as DSML provider. Especially if One-X Portal doesn’t run on primary server but is deployed as dedicated application server it is possible to come into trouble if remote nodes are not reachable from that application server. Since release 10.0 you can now have one single connection from One-X Portal to IP Office primary server. Primary server will kind of act like a proxy to link One-X Portal with all other nodes. Continue reading
Last time we discussed how to handle Windows services with Microsft Powershell. This time we get a little deeper by restarting multiple services at once with an additional check if they all restart successful.
The last days we got many warning messages when connecting to IP Office IP500 systems that the server certificate will expire at the end of this year.
Warning about expiring IPO certificate
But why do we get a real bunch of those messages this time? Continue reading
Today we will take a look at how we can handle Windows service with Powershell.
Usually a software that is installed as a Windows service should run all day long without any issues. But did you ever run into the situation that a software does not run fully stable? That it only helps to restart the service? That is not design intend but what should we do? If it helps to restart a service once a day it can be used as a workaround. Nevertheless we should always try to force the vendor to correct the issue that makes the software instable or doing only parts of it’s work. But I also know that it is something not possible to convince the vendor for various reasons. Even if the vendor tries to fix the issue we just need to skip the time before the vendor has done his work.
To be honest it is not the biggest challenge to just restart a Windows service. But sometimes a service doesn’t start reliable or the start runs into a timeout. So we will also check the if the service started successfully and retry to start the service. I will cover some basics about handling with services in this post and publish a follow up article about checking the service state. In that case we have to check the state of the involved services in a loop and if needed trigger the start of a service again. Continue reading
With this short post I want to share information what you have to do to run Microsoft Powershell scripts from Windows task scheduler.
I like to automate tasks I want to run on a daily basis. Earlier I did that with batch scripts but I ran into the challenge to use workarounds to handle pretty basic things. For example if I want to call specific commands only once a week. Did you ever try get the day of the week within a batch script? Or did you try to get the current date formats in a way you can use it to name a folder. Sometimes the easier way is to call a VB Script within a batch script or you have to cut the date string into pieces an reorder the parts in the way you need it.
Powershell is way more powerful (perhaps that is where the name comes from?) and we have a bigger range of opportunities. Since Powershell is deeper integrated in Microsoft Windows than batch ever had been the interaction with files, properties and Windows services is much easier. Powershell gives us much better output than batch does so that we can reuse informations a command outputs.
Continue reading
Today Avaya made the new IP Office version 10.1 generally available. This release comes with a few new options and some minor enhancements.
Integrated Contact Recorder (ICR) can be seen as the new CCR. CCR was a less liked reporting tool for IP Office that had to be installed on a Windows Server together with a Microsoft SQL Server. I remember more problems than effort for those few installations we had. With the release of IPO 9.1 CCR had been dropped and the only replacement option had been the bigger and more expensive IP Office Contact Center. Continue reading
Did you ever ran into the situation where IP Office hardware died and you had to replace it? And in that situation did you have an actual backup available? For a single site IP500 there are many places to get a backup. If the chassis breaks you will have a backup on the SD card – in the case you will not find a non V2 chassis. If the SD card breaks the running config is stored in the internal flash of the chassis. If you don’t have both of them you will probably have an older config file stored in your Manager folder on your computer.
But what about IP Office servers? First of all there is more to save than just the IPO configuration. We have Voicemail Pro and OneX Portal. We probably have contact store and WebLM as well as WebRTC and it’s getting more with every release. Continue reading
Be aware that those information are for OVA deployments on ESXi Server only. Avaya has announced to allow IPO to be virtualized on Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) with the release of R10.1 but that is not covered here.
Avaya publishes a deployment guide for virtualized IP Office server for every release containing information about the needed memory and CPU resources. They also tell us what size the hard disk has to have based on the number of users. That is important because the OVA image by default has a disk size of 100GB. If the server has to handle more users you will also need a bigger hard disk. Another reason for increasing the disk size can be to use the IP Office server as backup target for the whole Server Edition solution. The backup task checks that there is enough disk space available to start the backup. Based on Avaya’s documents there has to be 60GB free disk space available if Voicemail Pro is not installed and 120GB if it is installed. If there isn’t enough space the backup will fail.
So you see the issue? The OVA comes with a 100GB disk but needs 120GB free disk space for backups… Continue reading