Our Cisco TelePresence endpoints are currently on TC6.0.1, while the latest being TC7.1.3. So I opened up TMS > Systems > System Upgrade > Software Manager; this is where we can upload the latest files to TMS, so the endpoints can download the updates easily.

Now the problem is when you click “Upload New Software”, select the TC7.1.3 pkg file, and hit the Upload button.

Everything looks fine, right until the upload reaches 100%. At that point, it’ll show: “Server Error – 404 – File or directory not found.”

The reason is that TMS only allows files that are ~300MB to be uploaded, and the TC7.1.3 pkg file is ~320MB… just a little bit over that upload limit.

The solution: Remote Desktop into the TMS server and edit the Web.config file, located at “C:\Program Files (x86)\TANDBERG\TMS\wwwTMS\”.

Find this line:

<httpRuntime maxRequestLength="307200" executionTimeout="300" requestValidationMode="2.0" />

And replace it with this line:

<httpRuntime maxRequestLength="512000" executionTimeout="300" requestValidationMode="2.0" />

Then find this line:

<requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength="314572800" />

And replace it with this line:

<requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength="512572800" />

This will increase the upload file size limit to ~500MB. Now restart IIS and the new limit will be used.

Tip: Copy the Web.config file to the Desktop and edit that copy. When finished editing, save it, drag it back into the wwwTMS folder, and click Replace file.

One of the things that must be done first before upgrading Cisco TelePresence Management Suite from v13 to v14, is to migrate TMS Agent to TMS Provisioning Extension. My company’s TMS was on v13.1, and the latest version was v14.3.2. After reading through the upgrade guides, I figured out that my steps had to be done in this order:

1. Upgrade TMS from 13.1 to 13.2.x.
2. Install TMSPE 1.0.
3. Upgrade TMS from 13.2.x to 14.3.2.
4. Upgrade TMSPE from 1.0 to 1.1.
5. And finally upgrade TMSPE from 1.1 to 1.2.

This should have been pretty easy and straight forward, but we wanted to migrate TMS from its physical box to a virtual machine. So what I did was installed a fresh copy of TMS v13.1 on a brand new Windows Server 2008 R2. I did a SQL backup from the physical box and restored it to our SQL server that we wanted to use. Then I upgraded TMS v13.1 to v13.2.

This is the point where I thought all the data was restored, upgraded, and ready to be migrated. I installed TMSPE and ran the migration tool, but for some reason it said Migration Successful with 0 users migrated.

I was confused, so I had to do a bit of googling. Thankfully, I was able to find this post written by cfiestas on the Cisco forums: How to transfer OpenDS/Provisioning VCS data to TMS for recovery purposes. It turns out that the TMS Agent database isn’t stored in the SQL database; the TMS Agent data is stored in C:\Program Files\TANDBERG\TMS\Provisioning\OpenDS-2.0\db\userRoot. So I went to that path on the physical TMS box, and copied the folder over to the new virtualized TMS.

This time when I reran the TMSPE migration tool, 37 users were migrated successfully! Now I am able to upgrade TMS v13.2 to v14.3.2, and upgrade TMSPE to v1.2.

Upgrading an old version of the Cisco TelePresence Management Suite (v13.1) to a newer version (v13.2+) needs TMS Agent to be migrated to TMS Provisioning Extension.

When running the TMSPE installer (TMSProvisioningExtension.exe), it will ask you for the SQL server that you want to use.

After entering the correct information, you may encounter this error message:

“A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 – Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)”

The solution is very simple; the installer needs to know what the port number of the SQL Server is. All you have to do is change <SQL Server Name> to <SQL Server Name>:<port number>! In my case, the SQL Server was using the default port (1433). So I just had to change “sql-06” to “sql-06:1433”.

We had a Cisco TelePresence Video Communication Server on version X7.1. The newest version is X8.1.1, so my task was to upgrade it, which went very smoothly! The only warning alarm that popped up was this message: “Insecure password in use – The root user’s password is hashed using MD5, which is not secure enough”

The solution is quite simple — we just have to SSH into the VCS with the root user account and change the password. On Windows you can use Putty. Since I’m on a Mac, I can open up terminal and type: ssh root@<ip-address> Type in the current password to log in, then type passwd to create a new password, and you’re done!

The reason is that after version X7.2, Cisco changed the hash method from MD5 to SHA512. Administrator account passwords are automatically rehashed after the upgrade, but not the root account.

No more tickets now!

There was this one Tandberg VC endpoint, that we call SGP, on our network that would not save any call detail records into our TelePresence Management Suite.

This particular endpoint was set up with a public IP address facing the public internet, so we thought maybe there were some firewall rules blocking the CDR being sent to TMS. Before asking the network engineers to look at the firewall and network rules, I tried playing with every single setting on the endpoint that I could think of. Nothing that I changed would get the CDR to save.

One day, while I was looking at the settings for a different device in TMS, I noticed a tab called Connection. In that area, there was a “System Connectivity” dropdown menu with “Reachable on LAN” chosen. Then I thought to myself, what if I change it to “Reachable on Public Internet” for the SGP VC endpoint? Because SGP was facing the public internet after all…

Solution: I went to SGP’s Connection page in TMS, changed the connectivity to “Reachable on Public Internet”, pressed Save, and made a test video call to the endpoint. Lo and behold, the CDR was sent to TMS!

Now we can finally start gathering CDR for this VC endpoint after years of deployment, and we can give proper usage reports to our managers.