This thing is going to kill me.

Today was a long day.

Our environment for Cisco TelePresence has a Telepresence Management Server with Provisioning Extension (TMSPE) and  a Conductor to manage the TelePresence Servers (Bridges) and multiple separate Active Directory Domains. TMS polls for accounts that should be allowed to use TelePresence resources and users can build a Collaboration Meeting Room (CMR (video bridge)) from there. We had 2004 CMR built through TMS.

Yeah. Had.

As best I can gather, a user profile is built by TMSPE. When certian parameters of their synched AD profile change TMSPE changes (?) the profile and if there is a CMR connected with that profile it is considered "out of sync".    Don't reconcile these out of sync CMR's because it deletes them and you won't sleep for a while because of that.

If a CMR is out of sync and you regenerate it they (at least in my case) get marked for deletion. We lost 50. And those 50 were not the ones you want to lose. They are gone however and I mourn their loss. I. Trying to bring them back the remaining 150 are now out of sync.

When you have a Conductor, you can build conference aliases manually. There is an API that TMSPE uses to build CMR's on the Conductor and the CMR is pretty much a conference aliases but it is held separate and is not in that list of conference aliases. There's a tool to search for the CMRs, but that's about it.

There is a magic goo that binds TMSPE and Conductor for those CMR's and they get held in a SQL database (tmspe I think was the name). I could restore that and fix everything. But that would make for a much shorter story and require that I have a backup.

Now I'm left with figuring out how to fix things. I am so super lucky that I exported the CMR's before regenerating everything. I know who had a CMR, but there is no way to use TMS to generate a replace ment CMR that has the same video number (which is what everyone uses instead of their video address).

I could manually build new aliases in Conductor and build a matching template to give them a pin.

I could tell everyone to build their CMR's again too. But with the remote possibility of an infrastructure overhaul in a few months I am reticent to cause that jumble only to have a do-over.

Should I leave you with something witty and positive?