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REPORT COPYRIGHT VIOLATION IN REPLY
Message Subject Food with Attitude!
Poster Handle Louis in Richmond
Post Content
Yesterday was the day from hell as far as work went. I had to spend close to five hours fixing my account in the office phone switch and screwing with the 'CISCO Jabber' client on my laptop needing four reboots and the removal and reset of the CISCO client.

Ahhh... background is needed. My home is my office so I need the proper tools to do my job.

Now that I have the new laptop and the obscenely over-capable new phone I finally got around to setting them all up to work together. Almost.

This is the type of thing that is part of my job but on a much larger scale involving hundreds of servers, hundreds of networks, thousands and thousands of PCs, network devices, printers, security systems, and users.

The phone switch and the client software is whatever CISCO's latest version is.

The laptop is secure boot, hardware-encrypted solid state storage so no HDD, whose battery actually lasts until my workday ends, running a gov version of Windows 21H1 with the latest updates [can't get much more up to date than 6/18/2021 below]

https://imgur.com/jjGsyHW


The phone is Android 11 dated May 2021 fully updated too, and has all these cool connectivity features baked into it as this version of Windows does as well. They both have been surprising me.

The phone prompted me to open "My Phone Companion" on the laptop the other day, select my phone [which was appearing in Windows], chose connect, and approve the connection on the phone.

Wow.

Lance texted me this morning and his text appeared onscreen on the laptop with a reply window where I answered him. The phone was still locked sitting on the table. I checked it and sure enough it had our text conversation in the text app. As are about fifty thousand other texts, every text I have sent for at least the past ten years were reloaded when I logged into the new phone--there really is a record of every text you've ever sent or received.

I'm working outside and it's my lunch break time now so I can take a few minutes...

I have my phone playing music, amazingly it is all exactly what I would chose myself. Google is choosing the tunes from my past twenty years of music choices and it has even included a few of the songs from the series Resident Alien I have listened to. Right now a Fiona Apple from an album I bought twenty five years ago is playing.

So my phone just now rings, but my phone didn't ring, my laptop did with a pop-up with my phone name, the caller name and number [Direct TV] and the answer or 'piss off' choices available. I answered and the call used the laptop speakers and mics for the call, while my music the phone was sending to the wireless, waterproof, bluetooth speaker paused.

I can even skip tunes or select them on the phone from the laptop [I know, I could just play them on the laptop, but this is cooler!] Ha--Tubthumping by Chumbawamba just came on!

I can switch the phone call between my laptop and phone.

Now the CISCO part. Seventeen months ago I forwarded my office phone to my cell phone and moved my office to my home.

The 'Jabber' software makes my laptop be an IP phone on the office switch just like my desk phone is. Now when my office phone is called, it instead rings on my laptop and uses it just as my cell phone does for the call. I can also use a bluetooth headset I have paired with it, but I prefer the 'speakerphone effect'.

My laptop now shows my voicemails at the office if any are left there, showing the caller, number, and a link to the transcription of the call which is also emailed to me automatically.

It was all happy until yesterday I decided to set up "Single Number Reach", SNR.

SNR lets someone call my office phone which rings on my laptop instead and if I don't answer it there in a selectable number of seconds it will send the call to my cell phone instead--a single number reaches me at the office or home! I can also set it so my office phone, laptop, and cell phone all simultaneously ring.

I emailed our WAN group and a staff CISCO engineer must have been confused as he told me to log into the phone switch and enter my cell phone number with a plus sign in front of it and a hyphen and letters behind it. That was supposed to be my phone's designation on our network, in an entirely different field on a different web page. Where I was needed my actual phone number with the 9 and area code before it.

The plus sign and letters broke both the phone switch and my client. It took five hours to clean the mess up and I needed to remove the broken client from my laptop and while not prompted to, I rebooted it four times during troubleshooting and reinstallation to be sure, like when one is nuking something from orbit, it's the only way.

So now it remains for me to again try to enable single number reach. A different WAN engineer helped me fix the mess yesterday and he wrote me in Teams "Don't touch anything. Keep away from sharp objects :)" to which I replied "Are you kidding? I'm even wearing my magic helmet and burning sage to keep it appeased."

I think I'll bring a PC to build out to the table tomorrow and tackle SNR then.

I want a quiet Friday. chuckle

[Wow, that turned out rather long!]

Here's my little guy below, he's asleep on the table in front of me, he tracks dirt and grass onto it. Oh, and no USB cable needed to download the pic from the phone. This version of Windows paired with the phone has access to the phone via Bluetooth, Wifi, and the cellular network.

If these devices ever decide to take over, they just may win the war.

https://imgur.com/Hl3P8Rg
 
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