How to communicate with a Cisco system

If you are new to your Cisco IP phone system and think 'Just how the heck do I talk to this system' then this guide may just help you.
being all new to this myself, these are the things I have done, advanced users may know smarter things.

How to communicate with a Cisco system   If you are new to your Cisco IP phone system and think 'Just how the heck do I talk to this system' then this guide may just help you. being all new to this myself, these are the things I have done, advanced users may know smarter things.

There are 4 way to communicate with the system as follows

Using your browser to view the CCME Using your Browser to view the CLI TelNet to the UC500 Hyper Terminal to the UC500

Also your users need access via their browsers to set the Speed-Dials and Personal Fastdials.

British Telecom installed our system for us, and me as the IT manager was left to mould the system to the way we wanted to use it, no training - did not have any idea how to talk to it, no real manuals as such.

We have a UC500 and a 520 giving us the 30 phone extension we need, this is distributed over two type of phones, 7911 and the 7941
(as the IT manager I at leased wanted a colour LCD phone but did not get one, purely to test the system of course) this system replaced our old Meridian phone network.

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Vlans (Virtual Local Network) this is how all the communications are made, there is one for the Data 192.168.10.1-255 and one for the Phones 10.1.1.1-255, there is also an outside interface setup but that is not for this help page.

We are interested in talking to the Cisco to adapt it to what we what it to do for us.

! interface Vlan1 description $FW_INSIDE$ ip address 192.168.10.1 255.255.255.0 ip access-group 102 in ip nat inside ip virtual-reassembly ! interface Vlan100 description $FW_INSIDE$ ip address 10.1.1.1 255.255.255.0 ip access-group 103 in ip nat inside ip virtual-reassembly ! interface Vlan999 ip address xxx.16.16.1 255.255.255.0 ip nat outside ip virtual-reassembly bridge-group 255 bridge-group 255 spanning-disabled !

Our Cisco system in-place

 

I did know that the phones (looking at the phone configuration under Network) was on and IP range of 10.1.1.x, I also found that the UC500 had another range of 192.168.10.x and our Network was on 192.168.0.x range

NOTE - if you are not on the same range as the UC500 you will need to connect a network lead to one of the UC500 ports and your network.

We do not us the PC port on the phones as a network point, In our company we have three network points next to each User, and the old phone system used one of these points with the users PC being connected to another.
One of the department has five CAD stations and they are very heavy network users, so did not want to try running VoIP and data at the same time.

So the first thing I did was add another IP range to my computer as follows

 

Adding an IP to your Computer

Double click your network Icon Click 'Properties' button Under the 'General' tab, select 'Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
and click 'Properties' Click the 'Advanced' button Under the 'IP Settings' button, click 'Add' IP address Now enter an address that will get you into the UC500's range
I just copied my IP and off-set the third set of digits to get 10 instead of 0

Try not to set any number between x.x.x.1 and x.x.x.12
i.e. leave the first 12 addresses free

You don't want conflict on IP addresses

Click the Add button

I now have my two IP addresses set up, click OK

 

Click OK again Click OK again Then click Close  

Browsing to the CCME

 

If you are on the same IP range as the UC500 or have added the range see above, then type the following into a browser page.
http://192.168.10.1/ccme.html replace the 192.168.10.1 with your UC500 IP number or if you have DNS running the UC500 name

 

Enter your Administrators User name and Password

Administrators View

The web page you will get is a kind of cut-down version of the Administrators panel, you can do enough from this page to users extensions and phones to get you by, but it is pretty limited, one other thing when asked for the User name and Password (Default 'cisco' of both) do not tick the 'Remember my password' as you may need to enter different User names and passwords to test user web pages.

 

Enabling User Web Access

 

To enable your users to edit their Speed-Dials, make sure they are on the same range as the UC500 or add an IP to their Computer as above
They would enter the same Web address http://192.168.10.1/ccme.html replace the 192.168.10.1 with your UC500 IP number or if you have DNS running the UC500 name
  Open the 'Phone' in the Administrators web page Click on the Phone ID for the user Scroll down to the bottom of the 'Change Phone' window and check the users name and if needed re-enter a password default (1234)

You will need to give this information to the user, 'UserName' and 'Password'

 

 

Now on the Users Computer enter the web address and when asked UserName/Password, this time ticking the 'Remember my password' box

 

When they are logged in they should see this screen Now they can select Phone, and edit the preferances

Depending on the phone type your user may have 'Speeddial' buttons on the side of there phones, in the Section marked '1' opposite they can enter numbers and name associated with the buttons on there phone in the section.
If any of these are edited, as soon as the user clicks 'Save changes' the phone will reboot automatically.

In the marked area 2 opposite they can setup their 'Personal Fastdial' numbers, these number may be access on their phones by pressing the local services button and scrolling down to 'Personal Speed Dials'
Editing PSD is instant once the user saves the chances they are available on the phone, NO reset required.

 

Web Browser 'CLI' Access

 

Using the same web page address as before but leave the CCME.HTML off the end

http://192.168.10.1/ replace the 192.168.10.1 with your UC500 IP number or if you have DNS running the UC500 name

Web page 'CLI' view

This is a good place to view the 'Diagnostics log' and using the 'Show tect-support' for your entire system configuration.

As a percussion in would click the 'Show tect-support' and copy the whole web page to a text document call CiscoConfig_DateTime.txt, this way if I mess up doing something I can look back at this text file and get the changes back in without doing a reload and resetting a running system (Depending on how much I messed up)

Use level 15 to get access to the lot (oh the power, use the force Luke)
Unless you know exactly  what you want to do this way of doing it can be dangerous, why I hear you say, well in my experience so far you can click on each command and sub-ascended into it but you do not know if there are going to be other commands below it or it is going to just fire the command straight off.
I only use the web page for commands I know what I am doing with or to view 'Diagnostics log' / 'Show tect-support'

There is a better way in the next two methods.

Example of sub-ascending into Ephone Templates

 

TelNet Access

 

This is my preferred method of communicating with the system and I will show you why.

 

Open a 'Command Prompt' window and type 'TelNet 192.168.10.1 replace the 192.168.10.1 with your UC500 IP number or if you have DNS running the UC500 name Enter your Administrators User Name and Password
Hit return and you IN.  

At any point in this CLI access mode you can type ? to get help, even half way through a command, to see what options there are on the sub side of the command and this is the main reason I use telnet to do most of my configuring, you can also do this with the next method below, but I prefer this window because it is in black and white clean and neat.

 

Just type the ? and you can see all of the commands

 

Example of editing an 'ephone-dn-template'

As you can see I entered the configuration mode with a 'Config t' command

then entered 'ephone-dn-template ?' to see the sub commands before committing, then entered 15 and a ? to see the sub command set.

NOTE - don't forget to type 'exit' to back out of each sub set of commands.

 

Hyper-Terminal Access

 

Much the same as Telnet this one except that it is easier to stream commands in, I use this method if I need to change a lot of things at once saves typing.

Open a Hyper-Terminal session under 'Programs / Accessories / Communications / Hyper-Terminal'
 

Give your new connection a Name In the box 'Connect using' select 'TCP/IP (winsock)

and type in Host address: 192.168.10.1  replace the 192.168.10.1 with your UC500 IP number or if you have DNS running the UC500 name

Type your Administrators UserName/Password and your IN

Once you are connected you could save the session to your desktop for easy access next time.

 

This has exactly the same features as TelNet but being a GUI has a couple of easy windows features to use.

This is how I setup paging the quick way within the company,

In a text file I created the configuration I needed config t ephone 1 paging-dn 76 exit Then just repeated this for all phones that needed the paging facility.

But not the command 'config t'

config t ephone 1 paging-dn 76 exit ephone 2 paging-dn 76 exit ephone 3 paging-dn 76 exit ephone 4 paging-dn 76 exit ephone 5 paging-dn 76 exit Then selected the whole text file and copied it to the clip, in the 'hyper-terminal' page right click the mouse and select 'Paste to Host'

This will then stream all of your commands from the clip to the Cisco

Alternatively you could select 'Send File'

 

 

And that is pretty much it apart from one last thing, if you are on a separate IP range from the Phones you could plug your network cable into the back of your phone and let the phone network issue you with an IP number.

 

I do hope this helps some people out their as until I found this site I was wondering lost, A picture paints a thousand words, and I have given you a lot of pictures.

http://www.redsack.com/blogs/communicate.aspx

Softman
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