Going to Help > About in the AudioCodes Syslog tool ACSyslog gives you a nice little show at first… The little animation blew my mind, so I subconsciously clicked on it, and was blown away even more. BOOM! Have fun using Keys 1, 5, Left, Right and Ctrl while debugging SIP messages!

X.509 certs are annoying. You need to get them issued with the right names, or reissued if you make a mistake or forget a SAN, and they need to be cared for from time to time otherwise they expire and make your world hell. Wouldn’t it be great if you could make them last longer than the default of 2 years? Especially if you’ve installed them all over your Lync infrastructure, like: ...

The Lync 2013 Management Shell has a tendency of getting stuck or hung when running on Windows Server 2012 R2. Upon opening it, all you see is a black window, no prompt. To fix the problem, just install the latest Cumulative Update package (CU from January 2014 fixes the problem). http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2809243

During configuration of an AudioCodes gateway, a required config for successful TLS negotiation is the use of an NTP server. If you’re running Active Directory domain in your network, your primary time source is the Domain Controller hosting the PDC Operations Master role. To test NTP is working correctly before hardcoding it into your appliances, you can run the following command: w32tm /stripchart /computer: The Stripchart modifier will show a strip chart of the offset between your computer and the NTP source you specified. ...

Right-clicking on the Task Manager’s network throughput graph can give you some nice details on your traffic. This will work on Windows 8, 8.1 and the equivalent Server editions 2012 and 2012 R2. Note that the statistics are only gathered while the Task Manager process is running and are not cumulative. For cumulative results, you can use the Get-NetAdapterStatistics | fl cmdlet.

Say you’re trying to speed up your VM deployments and create a template with Windows Server 2012 or 2012 R2, and in the process to clean up some valuable HD space you run something like the following: Get-WindowsFeature | Where-Object -FilterScript { $_.Installed -Eq $FALSE } | Uninstall-WindowsFeature –Remove What that’ll do is remove the binaries off any uninstalled feature and save you a few gigs… BUT you will need the media, or the sources in a share, any time you want to install a feature, which is fine… as long as your template does not get updated. The moment you run Windows Update and go through the motions, your media will no longer work if you want to add features, and installations will fail with something like this: ...

After applying Cumulative Update packages to Lync 2010 or 2013 topologies, there is a required step to update the back-end databases and the Central Management Store (CMS). If you forget because you’re either lazy or rushed, you’ll start noticing some things don’t work as expected, like the Call Park Service and the Response Group Service. Here’s an indication that your DB needs to be upgraded: Event ID 31059 by the LS Call Park Service clearly tells us to Upgrade the databse to CU1. See below for the cmdlets to run, but please refer to Microsoft’s official upgrade documentation for some important considerations: ...

In the days of work anywhere, at any time, from any device, having a reliable bluetooth headset that will integrate with Microsoft Lync and pair with a multitude of devices is a must. The Plantronics Voyager Legend UC is now part of my mobile office and is always in my backpack. Here are the things I love about it: It integrates beautifully into Lync. You can pick up and hang up calls with a single press of a button on the headset. Also, if you press the “mute” button on your headset, it mutes your Lync client so people are aware of your status when in conferences. This integration requires the use of the BT dongle (and of course it is included). Voice and build quality is outstanding for a bluetooth headset, and can play A2DP audio so you can listen to podcasts or music while in between calls. The noise cancelling is excellent and removes most background noise. Tested battery life is about 5 hours if you’re constantly talking (or listening over A2DP), and the headset can charge all the way to 100% in about 30 minutes. Zero effort in PC pairing. Plug in the dongle and you’re set. I have never had a problem with pairing to either cell phone or BT dongle. Can pair with a PC (dongle) and two other Bluetooth devices at the same time. You can pair your Lync client on your laptop and have your smartphone and tablet also paired, simultaneously, with the ability to seamlessly pick up and switch calls. Voice commands to “answer”, “ignore” or “call John Doe” built into the headset make it easy to handle calls without touching the headset, and sensors within enable you to automatically answer calls simply by putting the headset on your ear. The sensors are accurate enough to not trigger if you have the headset in your pocket. The UC edition of the headset comes with a few accessories that the regular non-UC edition lacks, like a nice little docking station for your desk, a portable charge cable which doubles as a micro-USB cable, and probably best of all, a case that holds the BT dongle and the headset with a built-in battery that can give you up to 14 hours of additional talk time! ...

While doing an integration with a Cisco CallManager cluster that was on version 6.1, I realized why Microsoft only supports CUCM 7.0 and above. Earlier versions do not handle E.164 and so calls through the SIP trunk into the Lync mediation pool would not have the nice “+” on the SIP Invites. Fortunately, Lync 2013 lets you do inbound and outbound translations to overcome these situations, although you’d still be running on an unsupported Voice gateway. ...

Lync uses a feature called Comfort Noise that reduces network traffic in moments of silence, but still allows the voice gateways to generate some white noise to avoid the “hello? are you still there?” conversations. If your gateway is not configured to support Comfort Noise, then Lync will throw Event ID 25073 on your calls, saying The Mediation Server service has received a call that does not support comfort noise […] The Trunk does not support comfort noise. ...