It’s well-known that a loss of trust dooms relationships. Imagine the grief, then, when your phones no longer trust your server. Not too many relationship counselors you can call for therapy sessions to solve that one.

No, but you can try the Bulk CTL Eraser application, an innovative deployment and management solution. According to company officials, the Bulk CTL Eraser “allows you to quickly and easily delete CTL/ITL files in bulk remotely,” hence the name.

As VoIP Integration reveals, “Erasing CTL/ITL files is normally a manual process performed on the physical phone.” The “loss of trust,” as network administrators are familiar, generally happens after an upgrade or migration, where one has to go through a key sequence on the phone to erase the phones CTL/ITL file.

Imagine doing this for thousands of phones and its easy to see the appeal of bulk tools. And the Bulk CTL Eraser product also lets administrators do the erasing remotely. There aren’t many other products out there with this capability.

All right, so why is “loss of trust” such a problem in the first place? According to a recent informative post on the company’s website, if your phones don’t trust your server, this means that as far as the TFTP server’s concerned, “the phone will continue to use the last known good configuration file, meaning any changes on made on the server will not take effect on the phone.”

In addition, a recent white paper on the subject produced by VoIP Integration explains, “One of the biggest problems that can occur concerns the ITL (Initial Trust List) file on the IP Phone (News - Alert). The ITL file contains a list of trusted servers within the cluster that the phone can communicate with.”

During a server upgrade or even during configuration changes it’s fairly common, the paper says, for the certificates on the CUCM to be updated. But here’s where you have problems: “If the certificates on the CUCM servers don’t match the certificates in the CTL and ITL files on the phones the phones will no longer trust the CUCM servers.”

Lack of trust, like when you stop believing anything your girlfriend says, and nothing she can say takes effect. It’s deadly to productive relationships.

Using the VoIP Integration Bulk CTL Eraser, you can select phones by device pool, location, calling search space, partition or extensions and delete all bad CTL/ITL files. As we noted earlier, you can even do this remotely, saving great time and expense when leveraging deployment and management solutions.

This solution boasts the functionality to complete these tasks through utilizing a CTI connection that is attached to the Cisco (News - Alert) Unified Communications Manager to communicate with the phones, as VoIP Integration explains, since “this allows for CTL/ITL files to be deleted even when the phones Web server is unable to accept remote control requests due to trust issues.”

Done right the whole operation can take minutes. Wouldn’t it be great if it were that easy in relationships as well? “Honey, let me hook up these electrodes, won’t take but a minute...”