Well I took some time during a planned outage to get my PowerVault 220s back online and migrate my VMware environment over to it. We have previously been running on a 4 drive stripe (SATA 1 disk) and a few times I know the disk IOPs were pegged.

Everything is now running on an 11 Disk RAID 6 volume with an added hotspare. Even though it may be RAID6 the spindle count is triple what it used to be, and they are Enterprise class SCSI 3 U160 drives, performance should be increased.

I've had my Trixbox CE 2.8.0.4 box online for several months now, it's been serving me well in my needs and is now in use more than ever since I've started working from home.

So of course I wanted to tweak the system abit and get full use of my Cisco 7960 and 7940 IP Phones. One item I've wanted to tackle again is RSS2Cisco a perl script written to format RSS/XML feeds correctly for our Cisco 79xx series phones.

Sadly installation isn't as cut and dry as I had hoped. Here are my steps...

Open a SSH session into your Trixbox system (use can use PutTy for this)

Initiate a cpanel session

perl -e shell -MCPAN

you can now install the perl modules that are required to get RSS2Cisco working.

Install these following packages

install DateTime::Locale
install DateTime::TimeZone
install DateTime
install DateTime::Format::Mail
install XML::RSS
install CiscoIPPhone

Choose YES at any time it prompts you. This will install any required files for each package.

A few side notes with my installs...

At one point in my fumbling around I had to force install DateTime you may not have to do this.

I also had to copy the text file from RSS2Cisco into your Trixbox CGI execution web directory

/var/www/cgi-bin/

Assuring execute permissions are enabled for the RSS2Cisco.txt

Rename RSS2Cisco.txt to RSS2Cisco.cgi and you are now ready to modify the file to your liking.

Below is an example of the changes I made to my RSS2Cisco.cgi file

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
#use warnings;
use CGI;
use LWP::Simple qw($ua get);
use XML::RSS;
use Cisco::IPPhone;
use vars qw($pathto @descriptions @feeds);
($#descriptions,$#feeds) = (-1,-1);

# RSS2cisco, An RSS feed to Cisco IP Phone Script version 2.0
# Copyright 2007, Joshua Cantara
# This program is licensed under the GPL: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt
# Newest version can always be found at: http://dontpokebadgers.com/rss2cisco/

# ************************************************************
# ATTENTION: EDIT THE FOLLOWING VARIABLES!!
# ************************************************************

# Change the following to the folder location of rss2cisco.pl on your server
# --------> DO NOT ADD A TRAILING SLASH. <--------

$pathto = 'http://trixbox/cgi-bin/rss2cisco.cgi';

# Add/Remove RSS feeds below. An example is provided.
# --------> REMOVE "http://" <--------

push(@descriptions,'BBC World News');
push(@feeds,'newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml');

push(@descriptions,'Local News');
push(@feeds,'www.ohio.com/news/index.rss');

push(@descriptions,'Weather');
push(@feeds,'www.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/KOSU.rss');

push(@descriptions,'SlashDot');
push(@feeds,'rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot');

# --------> There is a CISCO IMPOSED MAXIMUM of 64 feeds. <--------

# ************************************************************
# ATTENTION: DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE!
# ************************************************************