Upgrading My Amateur Radio License to Amateur Extra Class

I’ve been into Amateur Radio (aka: Ham Radio), for most of my life. I took my first exam (Novice) at age 12, but failed the first time I tried. You needed 1 minute of perfect Morse Code copy, and I just didn’t have it. I finally passed my Technician exam at age 13 and later went on to pass my Tech Plus and General. I recently renewed my license for the third time last fall. Licenses are good for 10 years each time you renew it, so I’ve been licensed for over 30 years. Last fall I decided to buy an HF Radio again. I got a basic wire antenna setup in my attic and I was back in business. With being in a very favorable part of the Solar Cycle, I have been having an absolute blast.

After a few months of reconnecting with HF, I decided for one of my 2024 goals, I would attempt to get my Amateur Extra Class license. I have not studied for a Amateur Radio license exam for over 20 years. It is a little bit different now than it was when I got into the hobby. When I started, there were 6 Levels of licenses: Novice, Technician (Sometimes called “No Code Tech”), Technician Plus, General, Advanced, and Extra. Now there are three: Technician, General, and Amateur Extra.

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Configuring Pulse Secure VPN Tunnel Override for Cisco Webex

In this post, I will show you how to configure up your Pulse Secure VPN client to not tunnel Cisco Webex traffic over your VPN tunnel.

Due to COVID-19, there has been a rapid push to extreme levels of remote work. Many networks, including ours, are seeing traffic flows that significantly differ from anything we’ve ever seen before. For example: VPN Gateways fully utilized, Internet circuit utilization that is through the roof, and an unprecedented level of Cisco Webex usage. All of this has changed the network traffic flows and it has created a need to look at what is going on inside our network and look for ways to quickly optimize it for efficiency and best end-user experience.

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Scheduling backups on standalone Cisco Prime License Manager (PLM)

About a year ago, we did an upgrade on our standalone Cisco Prime License Manager (PLM). After the upgrade, the option to schedule backups via the GUI was no longer there. Initially, I was told by a Cisco TAC Engineer that scheduled backups were not possible. Turns out if you dig into the CLI guide, it is possible but took me a little bit of trial and error to get the syntax correct. Here is what I used…

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Viewing Cisco Jabber local history file

I had to assist a few users with an odd local chat history issue with Cisco Jabber recently where some message history went missing. In working this issue, I had to engineer a method to read the local history database file and extract the chat history. This post covers how you can open and query this file if you find yourself in a similar situation.

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Changing CUCM hostnames to FQDN hostnames

CUCM-LogoI recently ran into a scenario that wasn’t really covered in Cisco’s Changing IP Address and Hostname for Cisco Unified Communications Manager documentation. We had already had our CUCM hostnames defined by hostname, but they were not using Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) hostnames. In this post I will cover the steps I used to just add the domain name to my node definitions as the process is much less complicated when compared to the full rename procedure.

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Fix existing RTMT profile after CUCM node rename

RTMT-IconI recently did a migration to move our CUCM nodes to be specified by FQDN hostname. We had been using non-FQDN hostnames, however, we wanted to migrate to using the FQDN hostname to line up with current best practices and in prep for piloting Mobile and Remote Access (MRA) on Expressway. In the process of putting together my implementation plan, I realized that we would likely lose any RTMT profiles we had saved which can be quite complicated and have a number of custom counters defined.

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