Michael McNamara

We’ve been running on a very old version of firmware for the i2002, i2004, i2007, 1140e and 1150e for sometime now. We initially put a lot of time and effort assisting Nortel with troubleshooting the LLDP/ADAC integration between the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switches and the Nortel IP telephones. We had been running 0604DBG on the i2002 and i2004 models for the past 24 months with great success on about 350+ phones.

We have another large IP phone deployment coming up in the next few months and thought it would be a good time to upgrade prior to deploying potentially another 300+ IP phones.

We’ve just started upgrading our Data Center (our testbed if you will) with the latest firmware.

• 0604DCG for Phase II IP Phones (2001, 2002 & 2004),
• 0621C6H for IP Phone 2007,
• 0623C6J, 0624C6J, 0625C6J and 0627C6J for IP Phone 1110, 1120E, 1140E and 1150E respectively
• 062AC6J for IP Phone 1210, 1220, and 1230

I’m happy to report that everything appears to be working properly. The regular i2002 and i2004 handsets work fine. The 1140e works fine with the Plantronics Bluetooh headset and the 1150es still work fine in our three call centers. We are using LLDP/ADAC with all of our phones as a way to standardize their configuration. We utilize CRQM for Contact Recording and that seemed to work fine along with Contact Center 6.0 when used with the 1150e phones.

We did have one or two problems with the Default PVID changing on the Nortel ERS 5520 switch after the upgrade (power cycle). I initially thought it was related to our previous experiences with ADAC which I discussed in this post. However, this problem only involved the PVID and not the entire VLAN so additional testing will probably be required to try and isolate this issue.

I have yet to test either of the new provisioning options, including the new DHCP option (“Nortel-i2004-B”)  or the new “Info Block” files retrieved over TFTP. I talked about the new DHCP options when firmware 2.3 was released back in May 2008.  I’m curious if either of these options will help ease the initial configuration of the IP handsets.

You can find the release notes for the Nortel UNIStim Release 3.1 here.

Cheers!

Here’s another one that I’ve personally seen and I think folks need to hear about.  Nortel has just revised this technical bulletin that was originally released in March 2008 concerning issues with their 8692SF (CPU) for the ERS 8600 chassis and the new 8005AC power supplies for that chassis. If you have non-E, E, or M cards in your ERS 8600 chassis with an 8692SF and 8005AC power supply you should check the hardware version of the 8692SF.

Unfortunately the bulletin makes reference to December31, 2008 as the expiration of the replacement program for folks that don’t have a support contract.

You would never expect a switch to not initialize properly on a hardware reboot would you? That’s exactly what can happen and I’ve seen the problem on a number of occasions since we upgraded all our core ERS 8600 switches about two years ago with 8005AC power supplies to support the new R modules.

Cheers!

The bulletin advises users to re-configure the VLACP timeout from a default value of 3 to 5.

5520-48T-PWR(config)#interface fastEthernet 5-6
5520-48T-PWR(config-if)#vlacp timeout-scale 5
5520-48T-PWR(config-if)#show vlacp interface 5-6
===============================================================================
VLACP Information
===============================================================================
PORT ADMIN OPER HAVE FAST SLOW TIMEOUT TIMEOUT ETH MAC
ENABLED ENABLED PARTNER TIME TIME TYPE SCALE TYPE ADDRESS
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5 true true yes 500 30000 short 5 8103 00:00:00:00:00:00
6 true true yes 500 30000 short 5 8103 00:00:00:00:00:00

The bulletin also refers to a software fix in ERS 2500 v4.2.1, ERS4500 v5.2.1 and
ERS5500/5600 v6.0.2 or later maintenance releases.

We really only use VLACP as a means of detecting FEFI when the switch equipment doesn’t support autonegotiation (example; Nortel Ethernet Switch 470 doesn’t support autonegotiation on the 1000Mbps uplinks).

Cheers!

As if it was a day late and a dollar short Nortel has created a new website in December to host their “Community Discussion Forums”. You can read the news release here.

http://community.nortel.com/go/main-threads.jspa

I’m happy to see someone at Nortel trying to-do the little things but like everyone I’m growing concerned about what lies down the road. There are quite a few of us that are staking our professional reputations on Nortel especially given the tenuous economic problems.

I’m a fan of Tek-Tips so don’t forget that discussion board just yet.

Cheers!

You’re going to have to read this document for yourself. Somehow its possible for an i2002, i2004, i2007, 1120e, 1140e and 1150e to throw a loop into the network when the devices are powered by external power supplies as opposed to using a PoE (Power Over Ethernet) switch.

As a rule of thumb I enable Spanning Tree with Fast Learning on all our edge switches since the auto MDI-X feature makes it very easy for a user or inattentive network engineer to physically put a loop in the connect by connecting to edge ports with the same patch cable.

Cheers!

Update: Thursday December 18, 2008

I’ve fixed the broken link above… Thanks Bob!

Nortel has released a new version of software for the Ethernet Routing Switch 5500 that adds quite a few new software features along with support for the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5600 Series.

I’ve posted the release notes for those that are interested in browsing them. I thought I would note that there is a  resolved issue in 6.0 for people experiencing problems with ADAC changing the port PVID.

Here are the five new ERS 5600 models;

• Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5698-TFD
• Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5698-TFD-PWR
• Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5650-TD
• Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5650-TD-PWR
• Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5632-FD

Just don’t try to manage that 6.0 switch with an older version of Nortel’s Java Device Manager. Device Manager support for the ERS5500 and ERS5600 v6.0.0 will be in Java Device Manager v6.1.6 targeted for availability from www.nortel.com by 2008-12-19.

Cheers!

Update: Sunday December 21, 2008
Nortel has now released software v6.0.1 for the Nortel ERS 5500/5600 series.

Cheers!