[Jim Fixit]

First, I am a Cisco engineer working mainly on network infrastructure. I have been trying to help our telecom guy with Polycom 7000 VTC units. He had been getting complaints of poor quality between them. Exhausted network issues investigations, finally started to look at polycom.

There was a setting on there for "basic configuration" which he had selected because he thought it would allow this unit to be backward compatible with some older non-High-def units we still have in the field.

But changing that setting cleaned up the jitter and image problems immediately. However then we began to have other issues with those 7000 units between them and offices across our MPLS network. We have a packet shaping device that had been detecting the packets from the polycom as "gnutella" traffic and of course it was disallowing them.

First question, has anyone worked with the 7000 enough to know what the 'basic configuration' option really does as opposed to say, other values he might have chosen? I do not know what he changed that setting to, only that it used to read 'basic' and now it's some other value that he's selected.

Second, can anyone tell me what protocols might look like 'gnutella' to a sniffing type of engine? And, would you think that by changing that setting we'd suddenly start seeing those packets where we hadn't seen them before?

I'm taking a lot of heat for my 'network' not being right. But when I look at the sequence of events, changing the config on the polycom not only fixed one problem but beget another. I'm just trying to get an education so I can troubleshoot future problems and the person I'm working with is not real open to explaining things, nor to reading the manual, nor to letting me borrow the manual. The online manuals I've found are pretty basic..."unbox the unit and plug it in" type of things.

Ideas on where else I can turn? Thanks!