Appliance Based UC Servers – and keyboards

If you live in the US or have a US keyboard attached to your UC server (any of the appliance-based platform - Cisco Call Manager, Unity Connection or Unified Presence Server) then you will never come across this issue. Otherwise, here’s a quick tale of woe – and a doh moment!

I was building a set of Unified Communications Manager servers attached to a KVM in a server room. I was going through the setup entering user names, passwords and shared secrets as normal. I’d then go back to my desk and attempt to log-in remotely using the same user name and password as entered locally – no joy. A bit of head scratching – back to the server room, change the password, back to desk, password works from the desk. Hmm, maybe it’s a new feature to force you to change the password once the system is up! Don’t remember seeing that one in the release notes. Anyway, by the time this had happened to the third server (these were built over a period of months not hours), I was getting a little frustrated. Eventually I worked out the problem by typing the password onto the screen – not at the password prompt – I know I should have done this much earlier, but you forget these things when you don’t do it every day!  - and lo’ (or more accurately  “DOH”), there where my @ should be was a “.  Yes, default (and only) keymap on these servers is US.  Now I used to live in Australia, and when I came back to the UK, I was getting problems typing things for the exact opposite reason (Australia uses US as their keyboard layout – like “Rowter vs rooter”).

So there you have it – lesson of the day – always type a something to the screen if you have any doubts about the keyboard layout (or you just think you are going crazy)!