I was at VoiceCon two weeks ago, participating in a panel where I talked about network resiliency and presented my VoIP Troubleshooting and Monitoring tutorial. Both presentations included examples of how you should be prepared for network failures. I'm a proponent of understanding the causes of...

Buffer tuning has long been an interesting topic for me. I recently found a blog post by Brough Turner, who wrote an interesting article about a potential misconfiguration of AT&T wireless routers that cause ping round trip times to be either < 200ms or around 8000ms (yes, 8 seconds!). http:/...

If you are like me, you probably have a long list of projects around the house and many of them in an unfinished state. How does that happen? For me, I'm usually working away when I come to the point where I 1) Don't have the right tool, 2) ran out of something or 3) am interrupted by a phone...

Have you ever used the OSI model to aid your troubleshooting? I've been able to use it to help me isolate the causes of problems and focus my troubleshooting to solve problems quickly. Many years ago I encountered a problem that has become a good interview question. I was at a prospect's site...

I attended VoiceCon Orlando 2009 this week and had the priviledge of participating in three events: Teaching a half-day tutorial on "VoIP Troubleshooting, Monitoring, and Metrics" in which I covered a number of VoIP problems, what their symptoms are, and how to correct them. I then covered...

The Cisco Press book Troubleshooting Cisco IP Telephony , is a gem. I spoke on troubleshooting VoIP in converged networks at VoiceCon this week (see the prior post) and some of the ideas for problems came from this book. It is easy to read and is organized in a way that also allows it to be used as a...

I'm speaking at VoiceCon San Francisco 2008 on the topic of Troubleshooting in Converged Networks. That's a fancy title to say that I'll be talking about VoIP troubleshooting. There are three excellent speakers this time around: Steve Guthrie of CA, Mike Hollier of Psytechnics, and me. The...