We have a WLC 5520 running version 8.5 and 3802i radios. We can't afford any Prime management, I only have the WLC web GUI to manage it.. I want to make sure that there is always free channel space available for new clients. I do not care if AC MIMO is used at all, if using it will result in reduced client connectivity in a dense device environment. It appears that by default the controller will try to run client connections as fast as possible wherever it can.  I have at times seen up to an 800 megabit client connection, established to a single device that doesn't actually have a need for more than about 10 megabit Internet connectivity. It is unclear to me if it will try to continuously maintain this ultra-fast MIMO connection to a single client, even if it means that other clients just coming into the the airspace are denied access because all channels are already in use. We kept having connectivity problems until I went into "802.11a > RRM > Dynamic Channel Assignment (DCA)" and changed the channel width from "Best" to "20 mhz". I no longer see the 800+ megabit connections, but people have stopped complaining their device can't connect. Should I be changing the "802.11n/ac (5 GHz) Throughput" and force the disabling SS2 "0-9" / "0-8" and SS3 "0-9" / "0-8" to turn off MIMO and assure maximum client channel availability? I have read that disabling the higher single channel connect speeds is actually worse for a network because faster speeds need less time to send, and so can pass through interference better.    ... View more

It has been determined that our organization is unable to afford the costs associated with SmartNet support, and we are just going to have to use the controller without any support contract whatsoever. I am going to try to take some proactive steps to keep the system functional in the event of hardware failure or data corruption without official Cisco support. My primary concern is protecting the (currently functional) VMWare boot flash and the CUCM / Unity virtual machine images. Apparently the best course of action is to shut down the controller, remove these storage devices, and then clone them to an external USB SSD with a 3rd party disk cloning software such as CloneZilla. I then perform a test writing the cloned disks back to non-Cisco storage media for the boot flash and virtual machines. This will be done in addition to the automated daily backups to an external SFTP server, so that in the event of storage failure I can quickly get it running again without having to resort to an expensive single-incident Cisco hardware support request. I am interested to know if anyone else has done such things to keep a Cisco device running without the official SmartNet support costs.   ... View more

I am quite annoyed to see that the Cisco BE6000S is going EOL in 2022. We JUST had this stupid thing installed in 2017 and I now discover it has only a 5 year lifespan before Cisco is forcing it into obsolescence. We are not a wealthy enough organization to be constantly padding Cisco's stock price.   I need a phone controller that simply does VOIP within a single building and will store messages for about 60 phones, maybe with an entirely flash based filesystem. And has a supported lifespan of at least 10 years from the time of purchase.   Though I expect to hear laughter for making such a request. For our fiscally conservative needs, I am probably going to have to dump Cisco and start looking into Mitel, or maybe even Asterisk on an Ubuntu Linux VM. ... View more

I have some old 4506E switches with the old 6L supervisor going obsolete in 2020. It needs to be upgraded, and previously I had seen a retail price of around $7000 for the WS-X45-SUP8L-E. Recently while doing more research on this I see there is a different version 8 supervisor, with a part number of C1-X45-SUP8L-E, and with a retail price around $1500. That is a surprising price drop vs the WS model, which for years has had a Cisco full list price of about $12,000.   Oddly, I can't seem to find anything that talks about both the WS model and the C1 model, what is the same or different between them for tech specs, or why there is such a huge price difference between them. Is the $1500 for real the proper list price for a new supervisor 8L-E, and not a refurbished unit? ... View more

Is there any public documentation available on how to logon to the root shell of the Cisco Native Unix (CNU) that runs on the 7945 phones?   I believe I have discovered why the flash eventually fails on these phones... the problem is flash memory bit rot which is just a normal part of how flash data is stored.   There are file system data structures (Partition table, static Unix partition data) written once during the phone manufacturing that are apparently never rewritten for the life of the phone, not even when a new phone load is installed. Eventually these flash cells lose their charge, the Unix partition table evaporates, and the phone will never boot again.   So, to fix this problem, it appears that what I need to do is to fully erase the flash file system and then build a new partition table and filesystem. This will then refresh and rewrite those data cells with new electric charges that then extends the life of the phone for many more years.   Apparently the only way to do this is to logon directly to the root shell of the CNU that runs on the phones, and potentially see if there is some way to enable or possibly even boot from NFS, so that the flash can be fully erased and rewritten without killing CNU and bricking the phone.    Does anyone know more about this? ... View more

I am the end-user stuck with a BE6000S after our "End of Life" UC560 was replaced. There was nothing wrong with the UC560, it already did everything we needed. Though of course we're talking Cisco here, so "but there's nothing wrong with it, it already does everything we need" is never good enough justification to not have buy an entirely different Cisco product and thousands of dollars of engineering time every five years. Gotta keep that Fortune-500 stock price up, you know. I hate the user interface of CUCM 11 on the BE6000S. The UC560 user interface was cleaner and simpler. For a basic 150 user phone system with only one controller and only voice mail used by the staff, there isn't a need for all that much complexity. But no, instead I have to deal with this to add a new phone, when virtually everything is a default selection that is identical for every phone. WHY make me have to wade through all this, and have to manually select all the defaults for which there is only one selection possible (which should just already be defaults) for each new phone? Can we perhaps add a few more unnecessary steps to the phone setup process for a 150 user system? , User names are another huge annoyance. Can we possibly be any more redundant about the number of times and places that a name needs to be entered? I just don't feel like I've entered the same information repeatedly in enough unnecessary data fields in random locations scattered throughout the system configuration. Hey Cisco programmers, in CUCM 12, could you perhaps work another 20 more name entry fields into the GUI for me to hunt for? That would be great, thanks. , Now sure, I suppose people will tell me that the Cisco Unified Connection Manager / Cisco Unity Connection Administration 11.0.1 are incredibly powerful and advanced, and capable of tying together globe-spanning multi-controller phone systems spanning huge megacorporations. And I will reply, yes, that is great and all, except you see the BE6000S is specifically sold as a 150 max user system. We don't need all these unnecessary bells and whistles to trip over that just make the system management unnecessarily complicated. I didn't think the UC560 GUI was all that bad, and it was definitely far less complex than this CUCM / CUCE layer cake I now have to deal with on the BE6000S. As the end user who has to manage the system after the engineers are done, I shouldn't have to need a two year Cisco certification just to add new users and phones.. ... View more

This is a continuing irritation with the WLC 5508. The AP device listing seems to be randomized, and I can not figure out how to sort the list. There is no order to anything that I can see, not by device name, or MAC address, or uptime. It's incredibly annoying. Software Version  7.3.112.0 ... View more

We are using CUCM  11.0.1.20000-2 on the new 150-phone BE6000S. The web management interface is at times very very slow to respond, and I have no idea what is going on, , The BE6000 is brand new, and is cisco's recommended upgrade path from our EOL UC560, so I don't see why it should be so slow and unresponsive at times. Just simply logging on, and clicking About on the page menu, and ..... waiting ...... waiting ....... waiting ...... and about 45 to 60 seconds the page finally loads. It's a really simple page, no controls at all, so why is it taking so long? Is the thing actually at 100% CPU for some reason, and underpowered even with it being brand new? ... View more

We have some 4500-E switches with the Supervisor 6E that Cisco is declaring EOL. Looking at the cost for upgrading... oddly I can buy the 8E supervisor for $2 more than the 7E supervisor... https://www.cdwg.com/shop/products/Cisco-Supervisor-Engine-7-E-control-processor/3983581.aspx?pfm=srh https://www.cdwg.com/shop/products/Cisco-Supervisor-Engine-8-E-control-processor/3109188.aspx?pfm=srh Meanwhile the 8E is much more powerful than the 7E with much more bells and whistles and tinsel, so for $2 more, might as well? We currently have a 5508 wireless controller, and it works, so there's no huge reason to use the 8E's converged wifi abilities yet. Is it possible to just ignore all that for now, and just directly reuse the existing 6E running-config on the 8E without hiring a CNE to come twiddle with it? I am not a "network engineer" but I know how to load configs, upgrade operating systems, configure VLANs, and recover corrupt switch flash from the 9600 baud serial port (Ack! Thppt!). Other than the 10-gig port configuration for ports directly built into the supervisor, is the rest of the config pretty much the same if moving from one supervisor to another without any other significant changes? ... View more

How does an "end user" go about making use of the Cisco Universal Small Cell 7000 series product? We are a rural school district with 0-1 bars of coverage in most of the building, for GSM or CDMA. I would like to have strong coverage throughout the building. I see Cisco has this Small Cell service, but as it says on the product datasheet.... http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/wireless/universal-small-cell-7000-series/index.html Licensing The software for the Cisco USC 7330 is only licensed by Cisco to service providers and others that have the rights and authority to deploy and radiate in the licensed spectrum bands. Ordering Information The Cisco USC 7330 is available for sale to service providers that have WCDMA, HSPA, and HSPA+ technology and spectrum assets in 3G Band 1 (2100 MHz) or Bands 2 or 5 (1900 or 850 MHz).  So apparently I can't just go out and buy this. How am I supposed to go about getting this installed? I need to have a "relationship" with Verizon, AT&T, or maybe both of them?  ... View more

With the 4500-E switch, how do multiple separate 802.1Q aggregation trunks on a single VLAN work so that they don't interfere with each other? Am I understanding correctly, that all I need to do switch-side with the Cisco Network Assistant, is to select each of the ports, make them all "802.1Q trunk ports" and nothing more needs to be done to group these separate ports into multiple separate trunks? If yes, then what keeps these various multiple 802.1Q trunk ports from getting mixed up or confused by the switch, with multiple trunks all within the same VLAN and switch? , Scenario....  4500-E switch with  - one 4 gigabit 802.1Q trunk  - three 2 gigabit 802.1Q trunks  - one 3-gigabit 802.1Q trunk  - multiple other typical 1-gig computer links   These groups of server NIC ports each have link aggregation enabled on each server OS: Port 1 - 802.1Q trunk port -> Server #1, NIC port A Port 2 - 802.1Q trunk port -> Server #1, NIC port B Port 3 - 802.1Q trunk port -> Server #1, NIC port C Port 4 - 802.1Q trunk port -> Server #1, NIC port D Port 11 - 802.1Q trunk port -> Server #2, NIC port A Port 12 - 802.1Q trunk port -> Server #2, NIC port B Port 13 - 802.1Q trunk port -> Server #3, NIC port A Port 14 - 802.1Q trunk port -> Server #3, NIC port B Port 15 - 802.1Q trunk port -> Server #4, NIC port A Port 16 - 802.1Q trunk port -> Server #4, NIC port B Port 19 - 802.1Q trunk port -> Server #5, NIC port A Port 20 - 802.1Q trunk port -> Server #5, NIC port B Port 21 - 802.1Q trunk port -> Server #5, NIC port C   ... View more

Does anyone know what the technical difference is between these two SFP+ modules? Their function seems to be identical. , The only difference that I can easily find, is that the SFP-10G-SR= costs about $220 more than the SFP-10-SR-S= module: http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Cisco-SFP-transceiver-module-10-Gbps/1651560.aspx http://www.cdwg.com/shop/products/Cisco-SFP-transceiver-module-10-Gbps/3671906.aspx   ... View more