The Flip

Shortly after a conversion to IP, I had a customer call me and tell me that the fax machine for one user was having a problem. Apparently every time she sent a fax it was received on the other end as blank. The fax machine still received faxes just fine and it printed out confirmation pages as if the faxes were going through as intended. Unfortunately, I was remote so I had them send me a fax. Yes indeed, I got six pages of blank fax with the fax machine added header and footer lines printed.

We went back and forth for awhile, they insisted that it had to be the technology and I knew that the technology should have been solid. And then it came to me, “Could you turn the pages of the fax over and try to send it to me again?”

“What?”

“Flip the pages over so that the printed words are facing the fax machine or away from the fax machine. Whatever is opposite of how it is now.”

I got a very skeptical “Ok”, heard a number being dialed and a few moments later got a correct fax through. For some reason, this user picked the phone system conversion as the most opportune time to forget how to use their fax machine.

Moving Time

This next one comes from my friend Amy:

It seems that Amy got an urgent call from someone in upper management. Their fax had stopped working and they had important puppies to kill, err faxes to send that is. Amy rushed over to the office and almost immediatly knew what the problem was.

“Hey, you re-arranged your office, I like it.”

“Oh thanks, I decided it looked a lot better this way. Do you think you can help with the fax?”

“Well, when you moved your fax machine to the other side of the room where did you plug the fax in?”

“I just found a port in the wall that the cord would fit into, that should work right?”

I think you know the rest of the story.

Number 9

This next story is a classic that I have experienced and had several people offer as a suggestion as a story to add to this post. So, I will explain it that way.

We all got a call from a user that was having trouble sending faxes out. He said that every time he tried to send out a fax he got a busy signal. We asked him whether or not he had tried dialing the number from his desk phone and if it went through or did he get a busy signal there as well.

“Yes, I dialed it from my phone and it answered just fine. Can you guys get this fixed quickly?” No matter what the fax issue, it must always be fixed quickly. Despite the fact that e-mail is faster than faxes. Kind of ironic.

We then asked, “Are you sure that you dialed 9 when you placed the fax call?”

“Yes, I’m absolutely sure that I did.”

Having nothing else to do, we all got in our respective cars and drove over. When we got to the person’s office we realized we should have carpooled because there weren’t many free parking spaces. We all headed into the office and had a look.

We all took different times to figure out the issue, but in the end came to the same conclusion, the user was pressing 9 and then a speed dial key. Unfortunately, the speed dial key already had a 9 programmed into it and was the entire cause of this issue. We all shook our heads in disgust.

Not My Fault

This next one comes courtesy of George:

George was working on a cutover recently and after the cutover ran into an issue with faxing to a remote user’s house. He checked a variety of things on the voice gateway, did a lot of research, did a lot of troubleshooting and in the end called Cisco TAC for a second opinion. Together they thought that it might be an issue with the PVDM3 that was installed in the router and a bug. The worked through this for awhile and the issue still didn’t get resolved. Finally George got results, with perserverance that most people don’t have.

He ended up figuring out that the problem was not on the corporate phone system side, but the receiver’s fax. The type of phone line that they had at the house was provided by Comcast and was not supported for faxing. A ton of troubleshooting for something that really could have been avoided if the far end knew what was supported.

Wrap it Up

I hope that you haver enjoyed this little exploration of the various end user issues that can cause fax issues that are totally unrelated to the phone system itself. I’d like to thank all of the people that responded when I asked for some funny end user fax stories, I got a lot of response and it was great to hear them. Of all the responses that I got, I think the funniest one was from a friend named Chris. He said that he didn’t have any funny stories about end users and faxes, other than the fact that they still actually use faxes. I’m with you there Chris!

I just realized that this video I did awhile ago wasn’t on the site here. If you’ve seen this before, thanks for viewing! Quick tutorial on how to configure mobility in Cisco Unified Communications Manager.

If you are unfamiliar with Class of Restrictions on CallManager Expresss, you might have someone try to describe it in the context of calling search spaces on Communications Manager, but what if you don’t really have a grasp of what those are? Rather than explaining a technical concept with another technical concept, I’d just like you to meet my friend Bubba, Bubba CoR.

dial-peer cor custom
  name Local
  name LD
  name Internationa
  name TollFree

dial-peer cor list Arnold-Outbound
  member Local
  member LD
  member International
  member TollFree

dial-peer cor list Gooch-Outbound
  member Local
  member TollFree

dial-peer cor list Call-International
  member International

dial-peer cor list Call-Local
  member Local

dial-peer cor list Call-TollFree
  member TollFree

ephone-dn 1
  number 1001
  name Arnold
  cor incoming Arnold-Outbound

ephone-dn 2
  number 1002
  name The Gooch
  cor incoming Gooch-Outbound

dial-peer voice 1 pots
  description local calling - Miss Chung
  destination-pattern 91800[2-9]......
  cor outgoing Call-TollFree

dial-peer voice 9011 pots
  description International Calling - Mr. Drummond
  destination-pattern 9011T
  cor outgoing Call-International

Several months ago, our Cisco small business rep came by and asked us if we would like to participate in a seed program. If we did a few things (pre-sales calls, made a sale, filled out surveys, etc) then we would get to keep the demo unit that they shipped to us (a UC320 and two SPA504 phones). You probably already know that I signed up for the opportunity, after all what self-respecting nerd would turn down free gear to play with.

Just a break to talk about what this is for those that haven’t seen it before. The UC320 is a small form-factor phone system that Cisco has made for small businesses. It is designed to support up to 24 phones and up to 12 phone lines (or connection to SIP providers). It’s claim to fame is the ease of configuration and attractive price point. Ok, let’s move on.

I received the box with the phone system and the two phone systems and opened it up. Let me start by saying that this thing is really small. The box that the phone system shipped in was smaller than the box that the phone shipped in. Small is good for small business because the often don’t have space for wiring closets, I’ve seen them hung over toilets, under water heaters (not a great choice, but that’s where it was) in storage cabinets just to name a few.

I will say that after pulling it out of the box, I was able to get the phone system out of the box and running within 15 minutes. I didn’t do a lot of customization, but I had a working phone system with two phones and a connection to a SIP service provider to make calls in that short period of time. Pretty great and I will say that just about anyone could probably get this set up with minimal interaction with an engineer. Just to test things out and see how easy it really was, I had my nephew who had no experience configuring phone systems when he worked on this. It took him about 30-45 minutes and he asked me two questions during the process, but other than that he got the phone system configured on his own with:

• Shared Line appearances
• Voicemail boxes
• Time of day routing
• Hunt groups
• Auto attendant
• and much more!

Ok, so that last line was kind of sales-man like, so let’s just forget that. The point is that he was able to get a lot of features configured without having to have prior experience with phone systems.

So far the UC320 looks like a pretty good investment. So far everything we have talked about has been good, so let’s get to the downers.

Routing
The first install of a UC320 was a challenge on a couple of fronts, but one of the big issues was the route plan. When you set up a UC320 you have the option of using a 7-Digit or 10-Digit dial plan. That’s it. There is no option for blended or anything like that. This particular customer was in the Austin area that still uses 7-digit dialing, but they lived on the outskirts enough that there was another area code that they could dial 10-digit local calls to. Because it’s an either or situation, the 7-Digit option I had selected would not work. The resolution for this was to set it to 10-digit dialing and make users wait for the inter digit timeout when they dialed a 7-digit number. Luckily this customer was fine with that, but there are some that won’t be.

Is it Windows?
My number one pet peeve about the UC320 is that every time you make a change, if you want it to be applied and in production, it requires a reboot. Change hunt group membership? Reboot. Add an extension to a phone? Reboot. Add a voicemail box? Reboot. I think that the folks designing this product followed Microsoft’s lead with requiring reboots. It makes it really difficult when you want to try out a potential solution for a customer issue when you can’t make a minor change without taking down the whole phone system.

Network Setup
I won’t say that the network setup is weird, but it is strict. There are certain things that can only be done through the “Internet” interface, like connecting to NTP or doing automated updates. If you already have your network set up with a decent router, there is a decent chance that you don’t want to replace it with a UC320. I was installing this at a customer site who had a requirement that we didn’t change their network structure (I realize that it is a little hard to do because you’re installing VoIP phones, but we didn’t change the data network). We couldn’t connect to NTP. Luckily the day before install Cisco released a patch so that you could change the system time from the phone, but before that there wasn’t even an option, it was NTP or nothing and NTP had to come from the Internet interface.

Phones
Ok, this is where my Cisco snobbery comes out again. The only phones that you can use with the UC320 system are the SPA series of phones. These are basically linksys phones that got re-branded as Cisco Small Business. It’s just my preference I know, but I prefer at least a 7900 series phone.

After installing it and seeing it in use, I can see a place for the UC320. It is extremely affordable and there are a lot of features that you get for the money. The big problems I have with it are that your configuration is fairly locked and when you need to make a change it requires a reboot. For small businesses, that probably won’t be that big of an issue, I just don’t really want to be the one installing it.

Put simply, the problem with unified communications is the same as the benefit of unified communications: it’s unified! When you have a solution that involves communications manager, presence, contact center, voicemail, conferencing services attendant console and more your upgrade goes from a very simple night of “watching the blue bar” to a lot of research and then some contortions on upgrade night to make sure everything is done in the correct order. Because it is unified, you now have to check all components of your UC system and make sure they are compatible with the new version. And that’s if you are able to upgrade.

I say “if” instead of when because of one particular scenario that I have seen played out several times over the past few months. Here is the setup:

Company XYZ is on Communications Manager 7.1(something). They are also running Unified Contact Center Express 8.0.2SU3. They have arrived at this version for two reasons:

1. The version of Communications Manager that they are running won’t support a version higher than that.
2. The previous versions of UCCX version 8.0 had issues that were going to be resolved by going to 8.0.2SU3.

XYZ has a variety of other UC applications that they use and one of them is non-unified attendant console. By non-unified, I mean the version that used to be included with CallManager. If you weren’t already aware, support for the original attendant console is no longer there when you upgrade to version 8 of Communications Manager.

Therein lies the issue. You have a customer who has used attendant console for a number of years that doesn’t want to lose it’s functionality. Now, I know there are a couple of different options to replace this. The problem lies in cost and requirements. Customers have a hard time paying for something that they have gotten in the past for free. But not only that, they have to buy new hardware for it. It would be like if someone came up to you and said:

“Listen, I know that the oxygen in our atmosphere has served you well for all of your life, but we are getting rid of that, we are vacuuming it all up. Now you need to pay us $1000 for every person that wants to use oxygen. But to use it you are going to have to buy your own container for it and it has to meet these specs”

Ok, I know the oxygen analogy is probably a little extreme (you won’t die without attendant console) but on short notice it works for something you have gotten free that is now being charged for. Regardless, the point is that I have run into several companies that are holding off on upgrades because they don’t want to fork out the cost of a new console solution.

On the surface, this seems like a good business idea. Push costs off until you can afford them later. Unfortunately though, this delay is causing more troubles and costs than it is worth. You may see that version 8 of UCCX and think that this should be a well developed product that doesn’t have many issues. Normally that would hold true, but 8.0 was the first release of UCCX that runs as a Linux appliance as opposed to a Windows application. Just like when Communications Manager converted over to version 5, there will be some issues.

These companies continue to have issues with their agent desktops and with services on the server behaving weirdly. Even if you dismiss the costs of downtime by saying that you have other ways for your customer to get ahold of you, there is still the cost of paying your chosen vendor to try and fix these problems. And I am certain that after a not terribly long time, you would have spent enough money to just buy the new software and hardware AND pay for installation and upgrade.

I guess what I am saying is this: if you run an IT organization, don’t just think about what the cost an upgrade will incur. Think about what it will cost your organization if you don’t upgrade. The answer wont always be to upgrade, but it also won’t always be to stay in the same place.

Translating 10-Digit DID to 4-Digit Extension

Probably one of the most common uses of translation-rules is taking a 10-digit DID number coming from the PSTN and breaking it down into a 4-digit extension. For our purposes, the DID coming into the system is 214-555-3XXX and the extension is 3XXX. Here’s what you will need to do for this task:

voice translation-rule 1
  rule 1 /^214555\(3...\)$/ /\1/

Ok, let’s stop there for a second and cover what we have just entered. The first line just states that you are starting a translation-rule and the tag for that rule is 1. That 1 has no relation to the 1 in the second line of “rule 1″. All of the rules inside a voice translation rule are processed sequentially and once a match is made the rule processing stops.

The first / simply signifies that you are starting the section where you will try and match a portion of the dial-string.

The ^ tells the system that the number that comes after it that it is matching MUST be at the start of the string. If you don’t have that in there, then it will match wherever it sees it (for instance, if you have a number of 01134521455530011 it would start matching at the 214).

The 214555 is simply the first digits that it will match. Take note, that anything matched by the system will automatically be discarded unless otherwise specified.

The \( is sort of like an escape sequence. If you see a ( or a ) then you will need to have a \ before it. What the \( and \) do together in this case is to split out a group of numbers that will be referenced later. In this case the numbers are 3 followed by any four digits.

The $ tells the system that the last number matched is the end of the dial-string to match. By using the ^ and the $ together you can ensure that you are matching exactly what you want to.

Next up is another / and this one tells the system that we’re done with the matching expression. It is then followed by another / and this time it means that we are starting with the replace string. In other words, everything between the first set of // will be replaced by everything in the second set of //.

The last thing that we need to cover on this one is the \1. The \ again is like an escape character and it says that what follows is not actually a number that we are putting in there but a group. In this case group 1. The easiest way to understand how it references a group is that in the match string, anything between a \( and a \) is a group. If you have more than one, then it just increments the number for each group. Since we only have one group in our match string \(3…\), the \1 puts 3… as the translated number.

We’re not done yet, let’s continue with configuration:

voice translation-profile DID
  translate called 1

Now we can talk about these next two lines. The first line just sets up a new profile called DID. You can call it whatever you want, just remember it is case sensitive. As I recommend with all variables, you should probably consider doing them all in caps or at least use a consistent naming convention across all variables.

The line translate called 1 tells the system to translate the called number with voice translation-rule 1 (referring to the unique translation rule tag that we discussed earlier).

The next step is to apply this translation-profile somewhere, and to do that you can do one of the following:

voice-port 0/0/0:23
  translation-profile incoming DID

OR

dial-peer voice 4444 pots
  incoming called-number .
  direct-inward-dial
  translation-profile incoming DID

I find that the first method is the easier of the two because if you, for some reason, have more than one inbound dial-peer then you need to remember to apply the translation-profile to each of the dial-peers you will use. With that in mind, the only line that needs to be addressed here is translation-profile incoming DID. The one thing about this command that has been known to trip people up is when to use incoming and when to use outgoing. The easiest way that I can think of to describe this is to look at it as the relationship of the call to the router. For instance, in out case the call is coming from the PSTN INTO the router, therefore it is incoming. If the call was going from the router OUT to the PSTN then it would be outgoing. With this command in place, you have officially completed translating the inbound 10-digit DID to a 4-digit extension.

Translating 4-Digit Extension to 10-Digit Caller ID

Ok, so this is kind of reverse of what we did before. Instead of making a large number into a smaller one, we need to make a small number into a larger one. For this section, I’ll put out all of the configuration at once and then cover the couple of lines that may need explanation.

voice translation-rule 2
  rule 1 /^\(3...\)$/ /214555\1/

voice translation-profile CALLID
  translate calling 2
voice-port 0/0/0:23
  translation-profile outgoing CALLID

You will notice that the second line of this configuration looks different than the previous example but that there aren’t really any different symbols than before. We still have a / signifying the beginning of a match string and a ^ saying that the string has to start with the next digit and then we have \( and \) specifying that there is a group that we will want to reference later, followed by a $ that says the string must end with the last character specified and a / ending the match string.

On the replace side of it, there is a / starting the replace string and then 214555, literally just digits that are put in place. Then a \1 to insert the first group from the match string (3… and that’s it. So this should take 3001 and translate it to 2145553001.

Next is the line ‘translate calling 2′. Pretty much the same here, except that we are translating the calling number instead of the called. Since this is to be used for caller ID, it needs to be calling because the phone on the phone system is the one that needs it’s caller id modified. The 2, just references the translation-rule 2 since we used 1 in the previous example (I’m assuming that all of these are on the same router).

Lastly, translation-profile outgoing CALLID is outgoing because the call is going from the router OUT to the PSTN. Remember, if we put this on a dial-peer instead of the voice-port then we need to add it to every outbound dial-peer that will send a call out that port.
Using Translations to Transfer a Call Directly to a CUE Mailbox

The next thing that we want to do is enable translations so that if a user can transfer a call directly to a user’s mailbox by dialing 5+Extension. In order to do this, we need a couple of different pieces than we have seen in the examples above. Here’s the configuration:

ephone-dn 40
  number 53...
  name Transfer to VM
  call-forward all 3600

voice translation-rule 3
  rule 1 /^5\(3...\)/ /\1/

voice translation-profile XTOVM
  translate redirect-called 3

dial-peer voice 3600 voip
  destination-pattern 3600
  session protocol sipv2
  session target ipv4:10.1.202.1
  codec g711ulaw
  no vad
  translation-profile outgoing XTOVM

We need to do the ephone-dn configuration so that when someone dials 53001, for instance, it will always be forwarded to the voicemail number and hit the voicemail dial-peer which, as you will see later, will call the translation-profile.

The voice translation-rule looks pretty much like the first example. There is a 5 before the extension and we are discarding it. The translation-profile looks a little different. When someone calls an extension and goes to Unity Express, it knows what mailbox to send it to by looking at the redirect number. Without the translation in place, the redirect number in this case would be 53001. That is the reason that we need to translate the redirect-called number.

Lastly, on the dial-peer that points to CUE (which we would need to access voicemail even if we weren’t doing the translation) we are calling the profile as an outgoing profile, again because the call is going OUT of the router and to the CUE.
Using Translations for Calls Coming from Gatekeepers

We’ve pretty much covered most of what I had planned on doing, but I wanted to do this one more section so that we could demonstrate a voice translation-rule with more than one rule. For our example, we will have a call coming from a gatekeeper. That call with have a tech-prefix as well as an international country code. For out example, three types of calls will need to be handled:

1. Calls to an internal number that are sent to the system as 2#5266123001 where 52 is the country code and 3001 is the extension.

2. Calls to an external local number that are sent to the system as 2#5266124923 where 52 is the country code and everything after the country code is what needs to be dialed for a local call (except the 9 for an outside line).

3. Calls to another country that are sent to the system as 2#38 and a variable string of digits. And we will assume that our outbound string to dial another country will be 900+country code+number.

In order to handle these three calls, your translations will look something like this:

voice translation-rule 4
  rule 1 /^2#526612\(3...\)$/ /\1/
  rule 2 /^2#52\(6612....\)$/ /9\1/
  rule 3 /^2#/ /900/

voice translation-profile FROMGK
  translate called 4
  dial-peer voice 4445 voip
  incoming called-number 2#T
  translation-profile incoming FROMGK

The actual rules are pretty similar to what we have seen before, we take a number and strip some digits off and in a couple cases add a couple back on. The most specific rule will always be on top because once it matches a rule, it stops searching. So you can see that the least specific (which just matches a string starting with 2#) is the lowest on the rule scale and will only be hit if the other two rules don’t match. One different thing about that last rule is that we aren’t matching the whole string. All that it looks for is 2#. We know that the calls from the gatekeeper all have an international code so if it doesn’t match our first rule (for internal calls) and our second rule (for local calls) that it has to be an international call, so we just replace the 2# with a 900 and leave the rest of the dial string alone.
Testing

Once you have your voice translation-rules built, you will want to make sure that you test them to ensure that they will work correctly. To do this, you will use the command: test voice translation-rule . Here’s an example of the command and the output that it creates:

test voice translation-rule 4 2#5266123001
Matched with rule 1
Original number: 2#5266123001 Translated number: 3001
Original number type: none Translated number type: none
Original number plan: none Translated number plan: none

You can see that our rule stripped off the 2#526612 and turned it into a station number of 3001.

There are several other things that you can use translation rules for, but for most of what you will need the above can easily be adapted to fit the situation. By using the principles covered in this document, you should be able to easily make them work where needed.

A customer called me recently and said that they were having trouble adding agents to their UCCX cluster.  We quickly went over the process to make sure that they would show up in resources and there was still no luck.  Everything appeared to be configured correctly.

We checked out the primary and secondary server and the one thing that popped out was that from the GUI, the Cisco Unified CCX Database service was in an unknown state on the primary server.  However, when you looked through the command line, using the utils service list command it showed the service started.

In the end we restarted the service from the command line (couldn’t do it from the GUI because it was unknown) and the agents showed up in the resources list.  Nothing groundbreaking here, just something I found interesting.

Before writing this I had discussions with several people about the bulk administration interface and most people were comfortable with using the phone insert and update functions but a lot of people weren’t terribly well versed in the import/export functions which I truly think are what makes this tool shine.

First let’s talk about what import/export is.  Like the name suggests, it’s a way for you to export configuration information out of the communications manager or import configuration that you have edited in a spreadsheet back into the server.  Got several hundred route patterns to enter into your system but don’t want to wait around for the page to reload after every entry?  Import/Export is for you.  Need quite a few translation patterns because the DID to extension mapping isn’t what you had hoped for?  Perfect use for this tool too.  You can also do a number of things like exporting phone configurations and then modifying one setting and re-importing over the top of what you already have.  The uses of this tool are huge and varied, it would take me more time than I have to explain all of it to you, so instead I’m going to go over just one thing that used to be a major headache for me: bulk creation of route patterns.  Let’s go through the process:

When bulk creating route patterns I like to start with something I have already created in Communications Manager.  A gold standard, for lack of a better term.  This is the route pattern that you have created that most of your route patterns are going to look mostly like.  Generally when you have patterns they there is going to be some commonality between them (if you have enough of them to warrant bulk importing that is!).  Things like partition, route list, discarded digits, numbering plan and so forth.  By having your gold standard route pattern created that means that we can just export that and then use it as a template in a csv file rather than figuring out the settings in the spreadsheet format.

After creating the route pattern, you will be ready to export.  Go to: Bulk Administration – Import/Export – Export.  You will have a whole lot of check boxes to choose from.  This just goes to show you every aspect of Communications Manager that you can edit with the import/export tool.  Enter a file name in the field at the top of the page, then check the items you want to export.  The check box that you are looking for is under the Call Routing Data section and is called Route Pattern.  Check that, scroll to the bottom of the page and submit the job (if you want to run immediately select the radio button for that, but be aware that this is doing database calls and could impact performance).  Once the job has completed (which you can verify by going to Bulk Administration – Job Scheduler) you can go download the export file at: Bulk Administration – Upload/Download Files.

The file itself is going to be a .tar file and in that file are a header file and a csv file.  You don’t need to modify the header file at all, but you will need that later in the process so keep ahold of it.  Now, go ahead and open the csv file.  Most likely it is called routepattern.csv. Whatever it’s called, keep note because we’ll need to make sure it keeps that name moving forward.

A quick note about editing these files for those of you that use Macs.  For some reason, when I try to open the csv file on my Mac it tells me access is denied or some other such nonsense.  I can open it just fine on my Window VM, so that’s what I have done.  If you have a solution to this problem, please let me know!

Once you have the file open in Excel, go ahead and delete everything but the first line (that has is the header for this file) and the “gold standard” route pattern.  Since we are using the same settings for everything but the exact pattern and the description, you should now be able to fill out the spreadsheet with any new patterns you need to configure.  Just enter the information that is changing and fill the other settings down.  It’s my recommendation that if this is your first time doing this that you should just do one route pattern for your first time.  That way, if you find that something is completely wrong, you only have one completely wrong item rather than 900 completely wrong items.

Once your file is the way you want it, save it back to a file named routepattern.csv (or whatever it was named originally) and use a tool like PeaZip or something else to TAR that file (together with the original Header.txt).  You can name the resulting tar file what ever you want.  Upload the file to Communications Manager under: Bulk Administration – Upload/Download Files. Click add file and find the file and put it in the import section.

Now you’re ready to import your configuration.  Go to: Bulk Administration – Import/Export – Import. You will be presented with a drop down that will allow you to select the file you just updated.  On the next page, check the check box for route pattern.  There is also a checkbox for override configuration.  Check this is you are re-importing route patterns that will have changes that you want pushed from this file.  Decide when you want to run the job and then submit it.  Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the job to complete and your route patterns will be in the system!

This is by far my favorite administration tool in Communications Manager and has saved me from tedious data entry on more than one occasion.  I will say to use it with caution, becasue there isn’t an undo button for any of this.

I thought more and more about this and then remembered this web site which has been restarted more times than I care to admit. I decided to start it up again but get rid of everything old and redo the focus. Im not just going to post tutorials. I’m not going to post any of one type of thing. The format is fairly wide open.

A long time ago, a teacher of mine told me that if you aren’t reading at least three things relative to your field then you are falling behind. I don’t know if the number is quite correct, but one thing is for certain. I haven’t been reading enough and I have been falling behind. Well, that’s going to change. My goal is to try to start reading more in depth information about things I already know and to branch out into new topic areas. Things like storage networking or security. This is my goal and I’ll see if I can stick to it.

Just a short post for an opener. I assure you that more interesting things are coming.