Last week, I had to call Polycom support for two issues. One of which I mentioned in another post (Automatic Gain Control issue) and the other was because I wanted to find out why their user manual showed some QoS settings that my version did not have access to.
After waiting on hold for ten minutes, the first tech support person I reached was a little cocky, arrogant, smart ass of a prick who was less than helpful with either of my support requests. At one point, he literally told me “we can’t control Windows” (which brings up the question, “Well why in the fuck did Polycom even make software in the first place then?”) in regards to my AGC issue even after I told him that I had disabled all of the Windows settings that take control of the audio interface. He also said that you can set up QoS in Windows “somewhere in the network settings” (which turned out to be completely erroneous) without giving an ounce of help or direction.
Towards the end of our call, he was just trying to get me off the phone basically with an answer of “you’re fucked” to all my questions. At that point, I got pissed off and demanded to speak to somebody else. Finally, I got put on the phone with one of their product engineers and they actually addressed my issues. Long story short, the engineer ended up having to do a remote support session and did indeed acknowledge my AGC issue and gave me an explanation of why I couldn’t see the QoS settings mentioned in the manual. It turns out, those settings only show up if you use their provisioning server and they don’t even set the QoS settings in Windows like I needed.
After some brief research on the web, for computers running Windows 7/Server 2008 and up, I found out how to deploy the QoS settings via Group Policy. Inside of your domain’s Computer Policy template, you can navigate here and set the settings:
Computer Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Policy-based QoS
Since Polycom decided not to put any options to adjust or configure QoS settings in their RealPresence Desktop video conferencing software (version 3.3.0.50871), I’ve gone ahead created and exported the registry settings per the user manual’s definitions for the port ranges so that you can apply these to a single computer if you like instead of using Group Policy. For all of the signaling aspects, I used DSCP “26” or “AF31”, and for all the RTP streams, I used DSCP “34” or “AF41”.
Download the registry settings here.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\QoS] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\QoS\Polycom H323 Signaling 01] "Version"="1.0" "Application Name"="%ProgramFiles(x86)%\\Polycom\\RealPresence Desktop\\RealPresenceDesktop.exe" "Protocol"="TCP" "Local Port"="1720" "Local IP"="*" "Local IP Prefix Length"="*" "Remote Port"="*" "Remote IP"="*" "Remote IP Prefix Length"="*" "DSCP Value"="26" "Throttle Rate"="-1" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\QoS\Polycom H323 Signaling 02] "Version"="1.0" "Application Name"="%ProgramFiles(x86)%\\Polycom\\RealPresence Desktop\\RealPresenceDesktop.exe" "Protocol"="UDP" "Local Port"="1719" "Local IP"="*" "Local IP Prefix Length"="*" "Remote Port"="*" "Remote IP"="*" "Remote IP Prefix Length"="*" "DSCP Value"="26" "Throttle Rate"="-1" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\QoS\Polycom H323 Signaling 03] "Version"="1.0" "Application Name"="%ProgramFiles(x86)%\\Polycom\\RealPresence Desktop\\RealPresenceDesktop.exe" "Protocol"="TCP" "Local Port"="3230:3250" "Local IP"="*" "Local IP Prefix Length"="*" "Remote Port"="*" "Remote IP"="*" "Remote IP Prefix Length"="*" "DSCP Value"="26" "Throttle Rate"="-1" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\QoS\Polycom H323 Signaling 04] "Version"="1.0" "Application Name"="%ProgramFiles(x86)%\\Polycom\\RealPresence Desktop\\RealPresenceDesktop.exe" "Protocol"="*" "Local Port"="3238" "Local IP"="*" "Local IP Prefix Length"="*" "Remote Port"="*" "Remote IP"="*" "Remote IP Prefix Length"="*" "DSCP Value"="26" "Throttle Rate"="-1" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\QoS\Polycom RTP Media 01] "Version"="1.0" "Application Name"="%ProgramFiles(x86)%\\Polycom\\RealPresence Desktop\\RealPresenceDesktop.exe" "Protocol"="UDP" "Local Port"="3230:3250" "Local IP"="*" "Local IP Prefix Length"="*" "Remote Port"="*" "Remote IP"="*" "Remote IP Prefix Length"="*" "DSCP Value"="34" "Throttle Rate"="-1" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\QoS\Polycom SIP Signaling] "Version"="1.0" "Application Name"="%ProgramFiles(x86)%\\Polycom\\RealPresence Desktop\\RealPresenceDesktop.exe" "Protocol"="*" "Local Port"="*" "Local IP"="*" "Local IP Prefix Length"="*" "Remote Port"="5060:5061" "Remote IP"="*" "Remote IP Prefix Length"="*" "DSCP Value"="26" "Throttle Rate"="-1"