bulk phone import and export CUCM 8.5

[timothy tomkinson]

In preparation for a migration to CUCM 9.1.2 we need to update the owner ID field on around 7000 phones. The only way to do this through the bulk admin tool is to export phone all details, update the field and then re import all the phones. The export generates a .txt file. If I open this as an csv in excel it automatically chooses the column data types which messes with the number fields by stripping off leading 0s. If I try and import the data Excel says there are too many columns. How have others been able to work with the phone all details export?

[Jaime Valencia]

Notepad, notepad++ or google CSV editors

[cortiz5]

In a presentation at Cisco Live 2013 they mentioned some utilities to help with this.  Is BAT the only option? The option above probably will work but it can be scary when you have a lot of phones if you make a mistake anywhere.

[timothy tomkinson]

If there is a Cisco utility to do this I would be greatful. To be honest I'm getting rather annoyed with this process. So far I've ran into these 2 bugs:

https://tools.cisco.com/bugsearch/bug/CSCsu97248

https://tools.cisco.com/bugsearch/bug/CSCtl87980

One of my colleagues has a created a script that goes through the exported file and fixes up the service parameters so we got around these. I piloted re-importing a couple of hundred devices and few spat out sql/db connection errors. I then tried to update another 400 phones the next night and although the validation goes fine, when I try and import i'm faced witha Memory allocation error:

sql.SQLException: Memory allocation failed during query processing.

I know this is most likely specific to our CUCM environment and we will be doing a restart tonight to hopefully resolve the issue (the TAC engineer suggested restarting the DB service). However it just seems like one issue after another to do a fairly simple task. The whole process of having to import every field on every phone to update one field is rediculous. I have a list of phone IDs and a list of users, why isn't there a way to define a custom file format and use the update option rather than having to re-insert all details?

This blogger wrote a cURL AXL script to pretty much do what I'm suggesting:

http://pandaeatsbamboo.blogspot.hk/2014/01/shell-script-to-update-device-user.html

However I have no prior experience with working with the CUCM Database via SQL and if anything goes wrong I would be stuffed.