Cisco’s Prime Collaboration Provisioning (formerly Cisco Unified Provisioning Manager) tends to invoke one of two distinct responses from Collaboration folks; seething hate or mild disdain. While I have several historical reasons to be a part of one or both of these camps, I actually like PCP and when it is installed correctly and used for what it was designed to be used for, I find it to be an effective and handy application.
With all of that said, if you’ve used PCP for than a minute, you know that it can be fickle when it comes to pushing through bulk orders and completing tasks. You’ve probably had a bulk order that just sat there and sat there and never completed. Maybe you looked in the job log, I hope you did, but if you didn’t you should next time. If your order has permanently seized, you’ll see a “wait” statement. If you see this “wait” statement, your job will not complete. Basically the wait statement means that PCP encountered a problem that it does not have a definition for. If it had a definition, the job would end with an error and all would be good (albeit still with an error, but complete). For example, if you have an LDAP synchronized CUCM but for whatever reason the user ID that PCP has and the user ID that CUCM has are different PCP will try to create a user in CUCM and CUCM will tell it “no”. No, should be an error, but not to PCP in this case. On a side note if you look at a successful job in progress you’ll see a “sleep” statement. Sleep means that the prerequisites are complete and PCP is just waiting for all of the requested changes to be completed in the downstream system before it completes its job. In PCP terms “wait” is bad “sleep” is good.
When you run into one of these “permanently seized” errors, you can reboot the box and hope that whatever gremlins caused the order to fail are dead and gone, but shouldn’t there be a better way? There is.
**There is a timeout value on the wait statements, so if you want to wait for the order the fail naturally you can, but during a deployment, time is almost never your friend.**
I found this little bit of joy on a Cisco forum a couple of years ago and I think it is a good tool to keep in your back pocket when working with PCP. This command does require root access, but you create a password for the root user when you install/setup PCP so that isn’t a problem.
/opt/cupm/sep/ipt/bin/AbortOrders.sh globaladmin <password> <order_number> -forced
The command above cancels all parts of a fouled/never ending order. To run this command you must SSH to the PCP box using root credentials. You must also have access to the globaladmin credentials, but hopefully that won’t be a problem.
Once you cancel the order in question, you can go back and fix whatever the problem may have been and reattempt the job.
I hope this long winded bit of information helps someone out there. If you have questions or comments, leave them below.
-Justin
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