Posts tagged ADAC

Avaya Ethernet Routing Switches and non-ADAC VLANs

6
September 22, 2011
by Michael McNamara in

I recently stumbled across this little tidbit and thought I would share it with everyone here.

Up until recently if you wanted to change the default VLAN (the data VLAN for the IP phones) on a port that had ADAC enabled you had to first disable ADAC, change the VLAN assignment of the port and then re-enable ADAC. This was problematic for two major reasons; 1) disabling ADAC would remove the port from the voice VLAN and would interrupt the connectivity to the IP phone causing an outage, 2) if your network administrator forgot to disable ADAC before making the VLAN change the switch would eventually restore the port to it’s originally configured VLAN (usually on reboot of the switch) which would ultimately leave the end device in the wrong VLAN and unable to communicate.

I blogged about the problem back in 2008 here and here and there were many of you that found out the hard way that neither Java Device Manager nor the CLI would warn you before making any VLAN changes on a port which had ADAC enabled. It’s now 2011 and while I definitely have more grey hair (I guess I should be happy I still have hair) it seems that Avaya has finally gotten around to resolving this issue. It seems Avaya also took the opportunity to eliminate two birds with one stone with the ability to now define multiple uplinks/downlinks in ADAC. In the past you could only define a single uplink which would be problematic if you intended to use the switch as a distribution switch to feed other switches downstream. There was no way to provision the voice VLAN on the downlinks because ADAC would remove any manually added ports from the voice VLAN.

The Autodetection and Autoconfiguration ( ADAC) Enhancements provide increased flexibility in deployments that use ADAC as follows:

  • expanded support for up to 8 ADAC uplinks and 8 call-server links – individual ports or any combination of MLT, DMLT or LAG – per switch or stack
  • the ability to change the non-ADAC VLANs on a port without disabling ADAC

Here’s what the ADAC settings look like within Enterprise Device Manager.

Ethernet Routing Switch 4500 - ADAC via EDM

Here are the platforms that support the new feature and the minimum software releases you need to be at.

I must admit upfront that I have not yet tested this new feature… although both changes highlighted above are very very welcome to me as a user. I can’t tell you how many issues we had with network administrators or engineers forgetting to check the status of ADAC and having all sorts of issues after a reboot (or more often an extended power failure – which led to a… yes reboot).

Has anyone else had the opportunity to test this out?

Cheers!

Upgrading the i2002 Phone Firmware

0
February 7, 2009
by Michael McNamara in , , ,

i2002_ip_phoneWe’re preparing to deploying 300+ i2002/i2004 IP telephones over the next few weeks. In preparation for this deployment we decided to upgrade the current IP phone firmware from 0604DBG to 0604DCG. The site has a Nortel Succession 1000M Call Server with 3 Succession Remote Gateway (SRG) 50s providing local PSTN and E-911 services at three remote facilities.  We have done this dozens of times in multiple locations and never really had an issue (except when ‘filter-unregistered-frames‘ was left enabled on the switch ports). This time, however, we came across a problem that caused all 12 i2002 IP phones at one remote site to get stuck in a continual loop trying to upgrade. It took us quite sometime to isolate the problem and come up with a solution although a little background is necessary to understand the problem.

When Nortel originally released the ADAC (Automatic Detection And Configuration) feature in the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch it required the switch to be pre-programmed with all the possible MAC addresses that an IP phone might connect with. The switch applied a dynamic configuration to any switch port where ADAC was enabled and the MAC address of the device was within the ADAC MAC address table range. In the article entitled, Nortel ERS 5520 PwR Switch, I documented a list of MAC address ranges to add to the ADAC configuration. In a subsquent article entitled, ERS 5520 Switch v5.1 Software, I surmised that it was no longer necessary to maintain the ADAC MAC address table.

It would now appear that my assumption was totally wrong.

The remote site that had the problem never had the ADAC MAC address table updated beyond what is in the default configuration. When the phone booted into BOOTC mode to perform the upgrade it wasn’t sending the necessary LLDP information to the switch so the switch wasn’t adding the voice VLAN to the port. The only problem was that the phone was using the voice VLAN tag and original IP address so while it’s requests made it to the server the phone never recieved an answer because the voice VLAN was not a member of the port that the phone was connected to. Once we added all the MAC addresses to the ADAC table everything starting working properly. Now when the IP phone booted into BOOTC mode ADAC immediately recognized the MAC address and applied the voice VLAN to the switch port allowing the IP phone to communicate with the SRG50 and the Succession 1000M Signaling Server.

no adac mac-range-table
adac mac-range-table low-end 00:0a:e4:75:00:00 high-end 00:0a:e4:75:ff:ff
adac mac-range-table low-end 00:13:65:00:00:00 high-end 00:13:65:ff:ff:ff
adac mac-range-table low-end 00:14:c2:00:00:00 high-end 00:14:c2:ff:ff:ff
adac mac-range-table low-end 00:16:ca:00:00:00 high-end 00:16:ca:ff:ff:ff
adac mac-range-table low-end 00:17:65:00:00:00 high-end 00:17:65:ff:ff:ff
adac mac-range-table low-end 00:18:b0:00:00:00 high-end 00:18:b0:ff:ff:ff
adac mac-range-table low-end 00:19:69:00:00:00 high-end 00:19:69:ff:ff:ff
adac mac-range-table low-end 00:19:e1:00:00:00 high-end 00:19:e1:ff:ff:ff
adac mac-range-table low-end 00:1b:ba:00:00:00 high-end 00:1b:ba:ff:ff:ff
adac mac-range-table low-end 00:1e:ca:00:00:00 high-end 00:1e:ca:ff:ff:ff
adac mac-range-table low-end 00:22:67:00:00:00 high-end 00:22:67:ff:ff:ff

The short story here is that you need to maintain the ADAC MAC address table if you want to avoid any IP phone firmware upgrade issues.

As a side note you also need to make sure that you disable filter-unregistered-frames on all switch ports.

I’ve inquired with Nortel about this problem but I’m still waiting for a response. It’s quite possible that this issue has already been “discovered” and will be resolved in a future release (or even resolved in this release).

Cheers!

ADAC and VLAN Configurations (Part 2)

0
February 2, 2009
by Michael McNamara in ,

In a previous post titled ADAC and VLAN Configurations I described some issues we were having with some of our switches where VLAN memberships were mysteriously changing. We suspected ADAC and we were right on with our suspicions.

We performed some exhaustive testing with ADAC over the past few weeks and can confirm, as Roberto alluded too, that ADAC will dynamically reconfigure any switch port that has ADAC enabled to the VLAN membership and PVID setting that was set when ADAC was first enabled on the switch port. In our tests we configured an edge port as a member of VLAN 10 and then enabled ADAC on that port. We then added the edge port to VLAN 11, removing it from VLAN 10. When the port went into an oper-down state ADAC added the edge port back to VLAN 10 and removed it from VLAN 11. We confirmed the same behavior with respect to the PVID changing.

In short if you need to make a VLAN membership or PVID change to an ADAC enabled port you MUST disable ADAC on the port before making the change and then re-enable ADAC when you have completed your change. As a side note any Nortel IP phone that is connected to the port will most likely timeout and reboot itself when you disable ADAC.

While I don’t necessarily disagree with the behavior it would be nice for either the CLI of Device Manager to alert someone if they tried to change the VLAN membership of a port that had ADAC enabled. (hint hint Nortel)

Cheers!

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