Jake Kappus.comCertified Geek, Dad, MMA fan, and ocassional Pro Wrestler

I should have known this one.  At a customer site troubleshooting an issue where the Cisco 7925G phones would not see certain AP’s.  This was especially troubling since some locations had only one or two AP’s.

I could connect to the AP with no problem with a laptop on the same band and SSID.  Yet the phone could not.  I thought it had to be a bug, so we opened a TAC case and applied the beta 1.3.3.0.3 firmware.  This didn’t help and we were escalated to another higher engineer.  They couldn’t figure out why the phone couldn’t see the beacon, yet a laptop could.

Then enters a 7925 design engineer….  He notices that we were using channel 165 on the AP.  Both I and the TAC engineer said “Yeah, so…”.  Apparently Cisco hasn’t yet programmed support for that channel into the firmware yet.  I never would have thought of it since I had DCA turned on to manage the channels automagically.  Turns out he was right.  We scheduled a quick outage to un-check that channel and we were back in business.

Finally found the quip about this in the 7925 deployment guide…in the “World Mode” section.  WTF????

Also, make sure you have the scan mode set to “Continuous” in the phone settings on Call Manager.

I guess I could only fight the inevitable so long.  My job now has me doing more Cisco work than I ever have before.  I didn’t realize how much I actually remembered about EIGRP routing and Multicast until recently I had to forklift a brand new network infrastructure in for a customer.  Just over the past few months I’ve worked with route/switch, wireless and voice technologies, even VMWare all at one customer.  And it’s gone really well considering I’ve only been working with Exchange and OCS for the past year and a half.

Now I guess I’m going to be stuck in the Cisco world for a while again.  In March I’m scheduled to go to Cisco voice training for Cisco Unified Call Manager and Cisco Voice.  And I’m going to be taking the CCVP as well.

I am however still going to be at Microsoft TechEd 2010 in New Orleans in June.  I’ll probably end up concentrating on Hyper-V, System Center and Exchange 2010 while I am there.

Change is good.