Over the weekend I thought it would be a nice challenge to see what would be possible with the Cisco Meeting Server (CMS) API. I came to the conclusion that a simple meeting manager would be a small but ample weekend challenge and so the No-frills Meeting Manager (NFMM for short) was born! No-frills Meeting Manager for CMS utilises Python 3, Flask, and the Bootstrap framework to provide a no-frills web interface for viewing active calls and basic conference control for a single or cluster of Cisco Meeting Servers (CMS).

Cryptocurrency, specifically Ethereum and Bitcoin seem to be in the news a lot at the moment and due to their wild price movements, I thought it would be an interesting use case for generating some graphs using Plotly. So in this article, I’ll utilise Python, to connect to the BTC Markets API, retrieve the various Cryptocurrency ticker statistics and write them to a local MongoDB instance; then finally create a line graph using the Plotly Python module.

In order to enable LDAP authentication utilising Microsoft Active Directory on your Polycom RMX you will first require an Active Directory security group. The below image shows an Active Directory user who is a member of a security group rmx_admins. On the RMX navigate to Setup > Directory Services. On the Directory Services screen, configure: IP Address or DNS Name - the IP/name that will resolve your domain controller/s Port - 389 or 636, 636 is recommended for increased security Search Base DN - should be a DN path above your users/groups Authentication Type - NTLM is the only choice Click on Role Mapping from the left navigation.

The below steps can be followed to setup automatic backups of the Cisco Meeting Server (CMS) using a Windows host. For similar steps for Linux, refer to the Acano Knowledge Base article here. The first steps involve creating a CMS user that can be used for SSH & SFTP, and generation of a private/public key pair. Once those steps are done, using PowerShell you can automatically back up your CMS by utilising the Windows Scheduler.

Two Node Database Clustering (Don’t Do It!) Recently a few people architecting Cisco Videoconferencing (VC) solutions have asked the question, “_how many servers do I need to cluster the CMS database? _” or similar. Given the size of the deployments are relatively small the answer is always three and hopefully the following will help solidify why that is. It’s also worth noting that there is currently a limit of five database nodes in a cluster.

Content Sharing Issues over a VCS/Expressway Zone to CUCM 10.5+ Recently I’ve come across a few instances of content sharing in various Cisco video conferencing (VC) environments that have all been related to the same misconfiguration. Specifically, the environments where there is devices hanging off/behind a VCS:C or Expressway-C with a zone to a CUCM 10.5 cluster that has VC endpoints registered to it. Calls traversing the zone/trunk result in issues with BFCP.

For anyone who has been following along with the Cisco Spark Hybrid series, you will likely come across the issue of audio-only calls to video conferencing (VC) devices. For those of you who have successfully deployed Cisco Spark Hybrid Call Aware/Connect and are just experiencing this issue welcome! If your Spark Hybrid clients are only able to achieve audio and not video when calling VC devices read on to resolve the problem.

Part four depicts the steps required to add the Expressway-C Call Connector into Cisco Collaboration Managment (CCM). Log into CCM and Navigate to Services Add the Expressway-C as a Hybrid Call Service Resource In this environment, the Expressway-C has already been added. Clicking on the device will show you the panel shown in the second image. Clicking edit cluster settings will allow you to alter the cluster name and upgrade schedule.

On Cisco Unified CM Enable users for unified mobility. Unified Mobility can be enabled from UCM Administration > User Management > End User. Configure a CTI Remote Device for each user’s primary extension. Alternatively, the administrator can configure automatic creation of the CTI Remote Devices with the limitation that settings like Calling Search Space, Rerouting Calling Search Space, Location and Device Pool will be shared between all CTI Remote Devices

Recently I came across an issue with some CMS WebRTC users where their microphones were not working when joining spaces. After some initial troubleshooting, we found that the Domain Group Policy was altering settings related to the Microphone preventing it from being used on the CMS WebRTC site. The setting in question is named Do not allows sites to access your microphone. Which can be found by navigating per the below points.