Getting married? Don;t forget to change the email names too

This is something that guys usually don't think of. But when a female gets married, she usually changes her last name.

Where are names changed?

Obviously, driver's license. How about social security card. SS didn't used to be as important but with the new national security policies in place, driver's license now links to the SS. so you must get the names to match

Public record name changes can be a topic on its own, but I would like to talk about name changes in our work and social environment.

Here, the obvious change is email addresses. If you use MS Exchange, you will need to talk your Exchange Administrator. Seems simple, but the poor fella has to go through quite a few things to get it right. I just went through this for a small company. I thought I'll document this so that I'll know better next time.

The following steps are for 2003SBS.
1. Goto Administor Tools - Active Directory Users and Computers > MyBusiness > Users > SBSUsers and locate the user.
2. Right click user name and rename to new name
3. Right click user name and choose properties - goto General tab > change First Name, Last Name, Display Name as necessary
4. Goto E-mail Addresses tab, add new E-mail address if a new email address is needed. Do not delete the old one yet, otherwise all mail addressed to the old name will be bounced.
5. Goto Account tab, change User logon name if you want to change that too.

Now goto the user's desktop and open Outlook
1. goto Tools > Send/Receive > Downlad Address Book
2. enter new email, click options to make sure User name is new name.
3. reboot.

This is all that I remembered.

DynDNS and VoIP

Just found an interesting situation regarding my VoIP phone. It might warrant some further investigation.

I took my Polycom phone home and put it behind a TrendNet router. Normally, this phone is connected to Broadsoft.

I happen to use DDNS so that I can get a URL to point to this router. But as soon as I enable DDNS, the Polycom phone quits. If I disable DDNS and restart the phone, it works again. I tried this a few times and I can duplicate this situation. so I am sure DDNS is interfering with the VoIP's DNS. Must have something to do with STUN.

Lession learned - don't enable DDNS at the router if you intend to use VoIP to Broadsoft.

Fixing a Cisco "Brick" phone

I need to write this down before I forget.

I bought a brand new Cisco 7940 phone and I wanted to make it into a SIP phone. Had done this before, so I thought it would have been no problem with doing this one. Murphy law strikes and I ended up with a phone that will not respond to any command other than the factory reset sequence. Even after the factory reset, it stopped with an error message "Protocol Application Invalid".

I hunted all over the web to find the solution. After many long hours, I came to realize that the Cisco phone boot up with a default sequence called Cisco Discovery Protocol or CDP. Wireshark log showed that the phone was sending out this CDP. So I was happy to see that the phone was OK.

I also found a Cisco document 67942 that explained the reason behind why it was getting the error message. Apparently, it cannot find the firmware image in the default tftp location and it is confused. It also needed the option 150 in the DHCP to point to the tftp server IP address.

So, this is what I did to fix the phone.

1. download TFTPUtil from sourceforge.net at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tftputil/
2. download dual server from sourceforge.net at http://sourceforge.net/projects/dhcp-dns-server/
3. get the proper SIP image for the phone.

4. install both the TFTPUtil and the dual server
5. I used a hub to connect the phone to my PC. I suppose a cross over cable will work too.
6. set up the PC with a fixed IP address. I used 192.168.168.5
7. modify the "DualSever.ini" file as follows, (remove the double quotes, of course)
added line 223 "DHCP_Range=192.168.168.100-192.168.168.150"
added line 371 "Next_Server=192.168.168.5"
added line 372 "150=192.168.168.5"
8. place the properly configured SIP image (unzipped) to the default TFTP file location
9. start the TFTPUtil and the DualServer
10. power cycle the Cisco phone.

That's all there is to it.

Once I figured it out, it took less than 10 minutes. So here it is hoping to save myself and all others a few hours in case this problem shows up in the future.