I was fortunate to be in the local office on Monday to learn of an advanced voice training class for the support teams being delivered Tuesday – Thursday. For the comments about availability externally for partners, the Microsoft Certified Master course would be the only current available course. I'll see if anything can be done about this particular one.  

This is the type of training in which you question whether the creators of it are cruel people because it is all about having problems that result in no error messages or a misleading error or worse a level of subtly that frustrates the most patient of people. Couple this with a virtualized topology with minimal resources and services that might need restarting (Mediation and Front End) and you have 3 days of frustration. If it were not for others in the room being equally frustrated (except for Matt Jr.) I would have quit my day job thinking I was no longer fit to do it.

However here is what I learned and won’t forget

1. Media Bypass includes dependencies on the Network Configuration where the subnet mask must be equal. While a 16 bit subnet mask (255.255.0.0) is technically part of a 24 bit subnet mask (255.255.255.0) the client must have a subnet mask equal to what is defined in Topology Builder.
2. Media Bypass can fail because of the client encryption policy - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/gg398580.aspx 
3. Device sign-in failures rely heavily on DHCP and under the right circumstances (usually manually or 3rd party DHCP) there might be erroneous characters at the beginning of the data – 00 in Hex or 2 periods “..”
4. Failing to retrieve a parked call will give an error “User is not authorized to call the specified number” when the root issue is that called number and translated number are not equal due to normalization rules. I would consider future efforts the use of * or # for the orbit numbers but this means it would have to be an orbit with greater than 100 numbers in the range http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/gg398361.aspx 

Is it worth 3 days of frustration in no helpful logs requiring you to pour over data in excruciating detail and that sick twisted look of pleasure on the instructors face? I think so and thank my tormentors Seema and Geoff.

TomL LCSKid