[cisco-voip] How Important is Running "Supported?"

[Norton, Mike]

When deciding whether to venture into unsupported territory, I think it is worth distinguishing between different types of “unsupported.”

One type of “unsupported” is when a vendor says certain pieces must be certain things and at certain versions, but you choose to go against their requirement.

Another type of “unsupported” is when a vendor declares that they are discontinuing all maintenance/development on a certain piece and that it must be migrated away from immediately.

Your situation is both. Cisco says browser must be a certain flavour/version to work with their particular solution, *and* Microsoft told EVERYBODY to get off IE9 months ago.

There are lots of environments where intentionally going “unsupported” is an acceptable risk, but IMO mixing both types of unsupported simultaneously is probably asking for trouble in almost all cases.

-mn


From: cisco-voip [mailto:cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Anthony Holloway
Sent: May-12-16 10:07 AM
To: Cisco VoIP Group <cisco-voip at puck.nether.net>
Subject: [cisco-voip] How Important is Running "Supported?"

All,

Over the past 10 years, I have seen a multitude of deployments that were not in a 100% supported configuration.  Most of the time, this simply results in "don't ask, don't tell" and as long as you didn't need TAC support, everything should be fine.  I don't necessarily mean UCCX server compatibility with CUCM, but like phone models, firmware, IOS code, gateway models, web browsers, OS, Agent shared lines or LG membership, etc.

Well, recently I just ran into a non-supported setup, where it caused the server to hit 100% CPU utilization and cause all sorts of problems in the application.

It was UCCX v11 and using IE9 for Finesse.

You can read more about the difference in the browser here, if you have access:
https://communities.cisco.com/message/215058/

Otherwise the summary is basically this:
UCCX v11 introduced a new technology to support Live Data feeds from Finesse to CUIC: Socket.IOhttp://socket.io/<http://Socket.IO>.  Socket.IO uses HTTP WebSockets<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket> to open a single TCP connection from Finesse to UCCX, and then passes all updates to the data via this single connection.

IE9 lacks the feature to support WebSockets and the Socket.IO software automatically allows older browser clients to fallback to single HTTP GET<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12993704/ie-and-socket-io-compatibility> calls for each data refresh interval.

This means that instead of having 100 Agents using 1 socket each, for a total of 100 connections that are persistent, you'll end up 100 Agents using hundreds of connections (quickly setup and then closed) throughout the day, resulting in what is essentially a DoS attack on the SocketIO service.

In theory, this would happen with any browser that doesn't support WebSockets.

So, how important is being in compliance when it comes to what's supported and not supported?  Do you typically bend the rules, or are you rigid and strict?


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