Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Anything and Everything

Tmobile Band 12

Tmobile bought up quite a bit of the 700MHz spectrum, but I wanted to see where it was being deployed.

Map of Deployments and other Information
http://maps.spectrumgateway.com/t-mobile-700-mhz-spectrum.html

How to find current band on iPhone
Open the Dialer
*3001#12345#*
Press Dial/Talk
This enables Field Test Mode
Navigate to LTE > Service Cell Info
Where it says Freq_band_ind that’s the band you’re currently utilizing. In my case it’s Band 2

http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/cellulartelecomms/lte-long-term-evolution/lte-frequency-spectrum.php

LTE BAND
NUMBER DOWNLINK UPLINK WIDTH_OF_BAND DUPLEX_SPACING BAND_GAP
1 1920 – 1980 2110 – 2170 60 190 130
2 1850 – 1910 1930 – 1990 60 80 20
3 1710 – 1785 1805 -1880 75 95 20
4 1710 – 1755 2110 – 2155 45 400 355
5 824 – 849 869 – 894 25 45 20
6 830 – 840 875 – 885 10 35 25
7 2500 – 2570 2620 – 2690 70 120 50
8 880 – 915 925 – 960 35 45 10
9 1749.9 – 1784.9 1844.9 – 1879.9 35 95 60
10 1710 – 1770 2110 – 2170 60 400 340
11 1427.9 – 1452.9 1475.9 – 1500.9 20 48 28
12 698 – 716 728 – 746 18 30 12
13 777 – 787 746 – 756 10 -31 41
14 788 – 798 758 – 768 10 -30 40
15 1900 – 1920 2600 – 2620 20 700 680
16 2010 – 2025 2585 – 2600 15 575 560
17 704 – 716 734 – 746 12 30 18
18 815 – 830 860 – 875 15 45 30
19 830 – 845 875 – 890 15 45 30
20 832 – 862 791 – 821 30 -41 71
21 1447.9 – 1462.9 1495.5 – 1510.9 15 48 33
22 3410 – 3500 3510 – 3600 90 100 10
23 2000 – 2020 2180 – 2200 20 180 160
24 1625.5 – 1660.5 1525 – 1559 34 -101.5 135.5
25 1850 – 1915 1930 – 1995 65 80 15
26 814 – 849 859 – 894 30 / 40 10
27 807 – 824 852 – 869 17 45 28
28 703 – 748 758 – 803 45 55 10
29 n/a 717 – 728 11
30 2305 – 2315 2350 – 2360 10 45 35
31 452.5 – 457.5 462.5 – 467.5 5 10 5

OpenManage and iDrac

We migrated systems from one colocation to another and re-thought our entire VLAN structure. All IPMI/iDrac/iLO/out of band management was segmented off into another VLAN for easier support and DHCP enabled. Unfortunately our e-mail servers didn’t get the memo about the IP change; sure, their network cables were moved to the new VLAN, but the IP address was not changed to either that network or a DHCP enabled state.

We didn’t find out until this morning when we attempted to revive an email server that had fallen flat on its face. Lesson learned.

That being said, I had always changed iDrac settings on these servers via the BIOS or lifecycle controller. I didn’t want to reboot the box again just to set an out of band management interface, so what was I to do?

Google!

Anyway, here’s the brief list of commands you can run if you have Dell Open Manage installed on your computer (with a simple ADMIN cmd.exe window)
Get current configuration
racadm getniccfg

Set Static IPv4
racadm setniccfg -s IPADDRESS NETMASK GATEWAY

Set Static IPv6
racadm setniccfg -s6 IPV6ADDRESS PREFIXLENGTH GATEWAY

Set DHCP
racadm setniccfg -d

Turn off or turn on the port
racadm setniccfg -o

Whole bunch of stuff here http://www.dell.com/support/Manuals/us/en/19/Topic/idrac8-with-lc-v2.05.05.05/RACADM_iDRAC_Pub-v1/en-us/GUID-03779EB2-C1FE-4E33-A82F-71A18E85CE5F

Android Playstore

I have an android phone now for only the second (third) time in my life:
1.) working for an MSP they required me to have their phone and it was a terrible motorola piece of garbage
2.) I bought a freedompop Samsung SII which had a battery that would last ~2 hours and was terribly slow
3.) I bought another freedompop LG Optimus F3 which has an awesome (so far) battery and is iPhone4-or-iphone5-peppy

I’ve been on the iPhone since the 3G came out, so it’s still somewhat different for me.

During updates on the LG phone I noticed that it was rather difficult to install new applications; I’d have to play around with rebooting it, turning the wifi off and on, laughing at it, and singing songs just to get a new app to install. In the play store I saw that google maps was constantly “downloading” but never finishing. I tried to stop it, didn’t work.

A day later, and growing more weary of how slow it was to download apps, I googled.

http://forums.androidcentral.com/samsung-galaxy-tab-10-inch/202017-google-play-store-not-working.html

btswein gave the answer:
“Clear the data and cache for google play”
Settings > Applications > All > Google Play > Clear data
or, on the LG
Settings > Apps > Google Play services (AND google play store) > Clear data

Then it magically worked much better! Thanks, guy.

Cord Cutting

So I “Cut the cord” back in 2013 after having ATT Uverse for a couple years. ATT had just informed me that my TV and internet rates would both be going up by a combined $30 a month, but that my internet speed had doubled (6Mbps up to a blazing 12Mbps)! Yay! So the service was cancelled.

An antenna was purchased from Crutchfield (Channel Master 4221HD)
While this antenna says “Mid-Range outdoor rooftop” I ended up just setting it up in the attic of the house and I get great signal strength (Channels 2 through 67+ all come in crystal clear)
I live roughly 30 miles away – line of sight – from the closest major city with broadcast towers
If I had a need (or more money) I probably would have settled on the Channel Master 4228HD for extended ranges
The antenna requires no power and I ended up re-using the existing coax run from the basement to the attic

Netflix and Amazon Prime apps on the TV. An AppleTV for connectivity to the mobile phones. Chromecast. XBMC (now Kodi) running on a raspberry pi is a major provider of entertainment as well.

The only complaint, after about a year of antenna TV, was the lack of a DVR function. I priced it out running MythTV/XBMC combo, but the cost of the computer in addition to the 30-35 watts of power used (about $3.50 a month in electricity) wasn’t ideal.

Then I read about the Channel Master DVR+ and was amazed! This is going to sound like a CM ad, but this is my experience so far.
I received the DVR+ and set it up with HDMI, power, and a wireless USB. I ran through the initial setup wizard and then updated the firmware. I could now pause live TV! But something was missing; it wasn’t automatically recording what I was watching so I couldn’t rewind. I grabbed an old laptop and a USB to SATA enclosure, did a little work, and then had a 250GB SATA drive external to the DVR+. After formatting all functionality was as it should be! $250 for this isn’t bad, although I had a USB wireless and external HD laying around already.

Cisco Callmanager CUCM LDAP Logs

So we had a working LDAP lookup system for our callmanager 8.x system up until very recently. What changed? We moved colocations and decided to decommission a few of the older domain controllers. No big deal, just point anything that had LDAP lookups to new DCs. Right?

So we noticed the callmanager was not populating any new employees. Hard to assign phones etc to them if that’s the case.

Connect
SSH to your CUCM box (our cucmadmin account was necessary)
I used putty.

List all logs, Take note of dates
file list activelog cm/trace/dirsync/log4j/ det date
The newest file should be on the bottom, looking like “dirsync0007.log” or similar

Open the log and see the errors
file tail activelog cm/trace/dirsync/log4j/dirsync00007.log
This will view the bottom part of the log (newest) live, so run a LDAP resync from the web interface of the CUCM and see results.
Unfortunately I had to wait the 10 minute timeout period to notice that it was looking at the old LDAP server despite the changes.

If I find out why it was still pointing to the old system I will update this post accordingly.

Cisco Callmanager Custom Ringtone

I’ve verified the steps work (with some deviation required) for CM 4.x through 8.x

As I have access to both Windows and Linux, I have directions that may utilize either one of these platforms.

Save your file as a .wav. I ended up using VLC Player to convert/stream to a .wav file.

On linux (with sox installed)
sox -t wav MYWAVEFILE.wav -t raw -r 8000 -U -b 8 -c 1 NEWFILE.raw resample -ql

Next steps are not well described, but I may expand them later.

Open your callmanager web page
Login on the OS Administration portal
Grab the ringtone.xml file (mine was in the / dir) (TFTP files)
Edit this based on your current ring tone files (follow along like a template)
Upload both the newly edited ringtone.xml and the ringtone.raw
Login on the Unified Serviceability portal
Tools > Services Feature
Restart the TFTP service

Check your phone and verify you can see the new ringtone. I found that certain models (7940) didn’t like ringtones longer than ~5 seconds whereas others (7945) were totally fine.