While dealing with Cisco Meeting Server (CMS), you may encounter many errors such as audio / video packet loss, signaling problems, and you may need to listen to network traffic from time to time to fix them. In this article, you can find steps to get Wireshark Packet Capture in Cisco Meeting Server (CMS).
CMS Wireshark Packet Capture Steps:
First, connect to your CMS server via SSH to access the CMS MMP interface.
In some installations, CMS may have more than one network interface. So, after connecting, use the callbridge command to find out which interface to capture from:
Find Interface Using “callbridge” Command
To start the packet capture process, use the pcap command (in our example we will use the pcap a command):
Starting Packet Capture with “pcap a” Command
Once you start the Packet Capture process, re-create the traffic you want to listen to, and then use the Ctrl + C key combination to finish the capture process.
Note: The size of the .pcap file can be up to 100MB.
You can use an SCP program to download the generated .pcap file (in our example we will use WinSCP). Connect to the CMS using the username and password that you SSH connection with the SCP program, and find the corresponding .pcap file, and then download it to your computer:
Hello, in this article you can find the basic configuration steps and how to enable web interface of Cisco Meeting Server (CMS).
There are 3 different interfaces for configuring Cisco Meeting Server: command line (CLI), GUI and API. The first CLI interface can be accessed via the server’s console or SSH (after the IP address is given). Now let’s start with the basic configuration steps, starting with the CLI interface and continue with switching to the GUI interface:
Cisco Meeting Server CLI Basic Configuration
When you connect to CMS via console, a login screen is displayed. You can log into CMS with default user admin and admin as password. After you log in, it asks you to change the password.
After passing this step, we can proceed to IP settings. By default, the CMS uses the IP which is received via DHCP, and if you want to configure CMS with a static IP address, you can use the following CLI command according to your own settings:
ipv4 a add 192.168.0.133/24 192.168.0.1
In this command, a is the name of a interface, 192.168.0.133is the IP address /24 is subnet mask and as you would expect 192.168.0.1 is default gateway.
Once you set the IP address, you can now connect to the CMS over SSH.
You can change the hostname which is defined as acano by default by issuing this command:
hostname cms1
After this command, the CMS will ask you to reboot CMS in order to activate new hostname. You can reboot the CMS with the reboot command.
You need DNS and NTP servers for CMS to work properly. Considering that they are already up and running, enter the following DNS (.100) and NTP (.101) IP configurations:
ntp server add 192.168.0.101
dns add forwardzone . 192.168.0.100
You can noe continue with the configuration to activate the GUI.
WEB GUI Configuration
In order to use the web GUI, first you need a certificate for HTTPS connections. This certificate can be either a self-signed or a CA-signed certificate. For ease of operation, you can use the self-signed certificate by issuing this command:
pki selfsigned cms1
After that, specify the interface and HTTPS port for the web interface:
webadmin listen a 445
For the certificate (s) to be used, we specify the self-signed certificate created in the upper section and with the relevant key:
webadmin certs cms1.key cms1.crt
You can use the following command to route HTTP requests to HTTPS:
webadmin http-redirect enable
Then finally activate the web admin module:
webadmin enable
Now you can use the web interface with same CLI user.
You can also find these procedures in the video below:
Cisco Meeting Server (CMS) Basic Configuration
At this point, I must point out that you need to use either CLI, GUI and API interfaces to configure the different services of CMS. So this means that you can’t do everything from GUI or CLI only. I hope this situation will change with next releases.
Hello, in this article, you can find out how to activate the H.323 Gateway function on Cisco Meeting Server and receive H.323 calls, and the necessary configuration parameters to enable H.323 on CMS.
As you may know, Cisco Meeting Server is a server that works with SIP protocol. Therefore, there is a gateway module that converts H.323 messages into SIP to handle the H.323 calls coming to CMS. If you are using H.323 in your existing video conferencing infrastructure or have legacy devices that only support H.323, you can turn on the H.323 gateway feature on the CMS to enable integration with the CMS.
Protocol Conversion & H.323 Gateway Module in CMS
Cisco Meeting Server H.323 Configuration Steps
We need to use the command line to activate the H.323 Gateway module on the CMS. After connecting to the CMS via SSH, you can activate the module by entering the following commands.
First we need to define the interface on the gateway module to listen for H.323 & SIP calls:
h323_gateway h323 interfaces a
h323_gateway sip interfaces a
To ensure that the CMS does not interfere with the existing SIP signaling, we need to define a different SIP port to be used for messages converted from H.323 to SIP. It should not be 5060 or 5061.
h323_gateway sip port 6061
For H.323-SIP calls, we need to define the SIP proxy address (actually the server itself):
h323_gateway sip proxy 127.0.0.1
We then need to define the key-certificate chain to be used by the H.323 gateway for secure connections:
h323_gateway certs cms1.key cms1.cer CA.cer
For calls that need to be converted to SIP, we need to define the SIP domain name to match the definitions of “Incoming calls” rules inside:
h323_gateway sip_domain test.local
CMS Incoming Call Settings
and finally activate the gateway module:
h323_gateway enable
If you want to get information about the status of the H.323 Gateway module, you can use the following command:
h323_gateway
H.323 Gateway Status Information
After these steps, you can make H.323 calls to the CMS. Since the H.323 calls made are converted to SIP in the CMS, you will see the calls in the GUI as SIP calls.
You can also follow these steps through the following video:
