Ah, CSCsb42763.  My old nemesis.  Those of you in the voice realm may never have heard of this little jewel.  However, you may have heard of its more common name: “Can you make it so that all the members of a hunt group can pick up a call when it’s ringing (call pickup groups)?”  Fine, you say.  You enable the call pickup group for each phone.  Except being logged into a hunt group negates that particular behavior for calls ringing in the hunt group.  Okay, so I’ll just enable the call pickup group on the hunt pilot…ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!  IT’S NOT THERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My friends, say hello to CSCsb42763.  This particular bug has been around since CallManager 4.0(2a)SR1.  According to the TAC Case Collection identifier (http://www.ciscotaccc.com/kaidara-advisor/voice/showcase?case=K11612191), this behavior caused a memory leak in 4.x versions of CallManager and was disabled by default to keep the calls to TAC down to a minimum.  But wait!  This is 2010?  Why hasn’t this been fixed/patched/enabled?  We’ve moved off of Windows and we’re now on our fourth major generation of appliance *coughcoughLinuxcough* support.  I honestly can’t say why this is still an issue.  If I knew exactly how TAC worked I wouldn’t be doing the job I am doing now.  Or I’d be getting paid a LOT more for it.

How do I fix this little behavior without going crazy?  Well, it’s time to get acquainted with the mysterious “Cisco Support Use 1” parameter:

1.  Log into CallManager and click on System -> Enterprise Parameters.

2.  Scroll down until you find the Cisco Support use section (It’s toward the bottom).  Under there, you’ll find the field “Cisco Support Use 1” (Yeah, real descriptive there, guys.  Why didn’t you just call it “DON’T TOUCH THIS UNLESS WE TELL YOU!!!!!!!!!!!”)

3.  Enter “CSCsb42763” (without quotes) exactly as it appears. Yes, case and spelling are very important.  The system is looking for this exactly string to enable the features that you seek.

4.  Go to the hunt group in question and you should now see the “Call Pickup Group” field.

BTW, if you are still on CallManager 4.2 this field has a different name, naturally.  You’ll find it listed under the more descriptive “Unsupported Pickup” parameter under the CCMAdmin parameters page.  But, really, if you’re still on 4.2 you’re probably using tin cans and string to talk to each other and don’t really need hunt groups, now do you?