Posts tagged ERS5500

Avaya Enterprise Device Manager – Help Files

19
January 31, 2011
by Michael McNamara in ,

Over the past few days I’ve been working with an Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 4500 (v5.4.1) and an Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 5520 (v6.2.1) which both utilize Avaya’s new Enterprise Device Manager (EDM) as opposed to the legacy Nortel Java Device Manager (JDM). As you know by now (from my previous ranting) that I personally thought JDM was a significant differentiator for Nortel/Avaya when comparing their products to other competitors. While I think they’ve done a pretty good job with EDM it has one major drawback – it’s incredibly slow. I believe that lack of speed will generally force a large majority of Avaya users to use the CLI interface which has it’s own problems and issues.

In any event I tried to use the Help while I was using EDM and quickly discovered that I had to set it up. You’ll need to download the help files from Avaya’s website (I’ve included links at the bottom of this post). And you’ll need to upload the files to a permanent TFTP server somewhere on your network. I use the word permanent because every time someone clicks on the Help box the switch will download the content via TFTP and serve it up to the user via HTTP so your TFTP server will need to be continuously running, it can’t be hosted on your laptop.

I uploaded both archives to my TFTP server and then set out to configure both switches.

Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 4500 Series

If you want to configure it via the CLI interface you can issue the following commands;

enable
config t
edm help-file-path ERS_4500_Help_EDM tftp address 192.168.1.6

In the example above my TFTP server was at 192.168.1.6 and the files were stored in /tftpboot/ERS_4500_Help_EDM on my CentOS Linux server. If you want to configure it via the EDM interface you can go to Configuration -> Edit -> File System -> Help File Path and enter “tftp://192.168.1.6/ERS_4500_Help_EDM” as the path. You should substitute the IP address above with the IP address of your TFTP server.

Once you’ve configured the path you could be able to click on any of the Help links.

Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 Series

If you want to configure it via the CLI interface you can use the following commands which are identical to the ERS 4500 with the exception of the path;

enable
config t
edm help-file-path ERS5000_Help_EDM tftp address 192.168.1.6

In the example above my TFTP server was at 192.168.1.6 and the files were stored in /tftpboot/ERS5000_Help_EDM on my CentOS Linux server. If you want to configure it via the EDM interface you can go to Configuration -> Edit -> File System -> Help File Path and enter “tftp://192.168.1.6/ERS_4500_Help_EDM” as the path (same as the ERS 4500). Again, you should substitute the IP address above with the IP address of your TFTP server.

The process is identical on both switches with the exception of the TFTP path.

Interestingly enough I get a HTTP/404 error when I clicked on the Help link (next to the Refresh button and above the path) in the figure above. The browser tried to load http://192.168.1.50/releaseNotes.html which results in a HTTP/404 “Not Found” error from the built-in web server on the switch. This only happens on the Ethernet Routing Switch 5520 and it works as expected on the Ethernet Routing Switch 4500.

Do you think there’s any chance Avaya will start paying users to report bugs?

Cheers!

References;

ERS5000_Help_EDM.zip
ERS_4500_Help_EDM.zip

VLANs and IP Routing on an Ethernet Routing Switch

12
January 26, 2011
by Michael McNamara in , ,

I’ve had a number of discussions recently with people asking how to configure VLANs and IP routing on the stackable Avaya Ethernet Routing Switches. I thought I would take a step back and document some basic configurations for those that might still have questions or for anyone that might be looking for some example configurations. In this post I specifically focus on how to configure multiple VLANs with IP routing on a single Ethernet Routing Switch 5520. (In a future post I’ll examine how to tag VLANs between multiple switches.) The example configuration below should be applicable to any model of the Ethernet Routing Switch 4500 or Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 series switches. This example configuration matches a build I recently setup to test the compatibility of the Avaya 1100 and 1200 series IP phones to connect to an Asterisk IP PBX. You can review a diagram of the test network in the figure to the right.

We have a single Ethernet Routing Switch 5520 (running software 6.2) with 3 separate VLANs each with their own Layer 3 IP interface. We’ll enable IP routing, configure DHCP forwarding (relay) and apply some basic best practices. The CentOS Linux sever at 192.168.1.6 will server multiple rolls; SIP server, DHCP server and TFTP server. In this example I’ll assume that the switch has a factory default configuration.

Let’s get started by entering configuration mode;

enable
config terminal

The “Default VLAN” already exists in the factory configuration so let’s rename it and assign an IP address to the Layer 3 IP interface;

vlan name 1 "192-168-1-0/24"
interface vlan 1
ip address 192.168.1.50 255.255.255.0 1
exit

Let’s create VLAN 100, assign ports 13-24 to that VLAN, set the PVID for each port to VLAN 100, create a Layer 3 IP interface and enable DHCP relay;

vlan create 100 name "192-168-100-0/24" type port
vlan members remove 1 13-24
vlan members add 100 13-24
vlan port 13-24 pvid 100
interface vlan 100
ip address 192.168.100.1 255.255.255.0 2
ip dhcp-relay
exit
ip dhcp-relay fwd-path 192.168.100.1 192.168.1.6 enable

Let’s create VLAN 200, assign ports 25-36 to that VLAN, set the PVID for each port to VLAN 100, create a Layer 3 IP interface and enable DHCP relay;

vlan create 200 name "192-168-200-0/24" type port
vlan members remove 1 25-36
vlan members add 200 25-36
vlan port 25-36 pvid 200
interface vlan 200
ip address 192.168.200.1 255.255.255.0 3
ip dhcp-relay
exit
ip dhcp-relay fwd-path 192.168.200.1 192.168.1.6 enable

Let’s make sure that IP routing is enabled globally;

ip routing

There’s no need to add any additional IP static routes since this is a closed network. However, if there was an Internet router at 192.168.1.1 we would use the following command to create a default route to 192.168.1.1;

ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 1

Whenever you remove a port from all VLANs it get’s removed from the Spanning Tree Group so it’s always a good idea to re-apply Spanning Tree to every port and set it to Fast learning. It’s also usually a very good idea to enable broadcast and Multicast rate-limiting (this is done in the hardware ASIC), setting it to 10% of the maximum port utilization;

interface fastEthenet All
spanning-tree learning fast
rate-limit both 10
exit

Cheers!

Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 Software Release v6.1.5

6
November 30, 2010
by Michael McNamara in , ,

Avaya has released software 6.1.5 for the Ethernet Routing Switch 5500/5600 series switches.

The following issues have been resolved;

  • The new unit config control feature (NUQC) did not work properly, for instance, when a third unit was added to the stack, it was not correctly configured (wi00554951).
  • A SW exception in the SNMP task that caused a base unit reset is now addressed (wi00554965).
  • An EAP enabled port with User based Policy configured timed out when a PC client went to sleep mode (wi00554946).
  • With LACP configured, some times the standby links were not properly recognized (wi00600984).
  • Some times POE powered IP phones would get the wrong VLAN ID after a stack reset (wi00686407).
  • A security vulnerability to DoS attack has now been fixed (wi00496350).
  • A memory leak that caused stack instability is resolved (wi00555049).
  • The LACP link was not properly removed from the aggregation during a unidirectional link failure (wi00488102).
  • A static route that went inactive, did not recover until a unit reset (wi00692259).
  • A log message was not generated when SLPP disabled a port (wi00554966).
  • The DHCP snooping entries were not properly removed with IP source guard configured (wi00554988).
  • The OutDiscards were wrongly counted as filtered packets (wi00692574).
  • Some times the GBIC info was not displayed on remote units if the GBIC was removed (wi00555110).
  • With EAP enabled ports at default values, the authentication failed on the first attempt (wi00691680).
  • The RIP updates with the destination address of 255.255.255.255 were not recognized (wi00703945).
  • Certain laptops did not work properly with DHCP snooping enabled (wi00733255).
  • Some VRRP Configurations were lost when a non-base unit was powered off and then the base unit was powered off/on (wi00731771).
  • The static ARP entries were removed after clearing ARPs or a power loss (wi00733359).
  • When a SFP was connected to a non-base unit and then removed, it would still show up at its original location (wi00827484).
  • The switch became unresponsive when displaying PIM configuration in “show running-config” (wi00555038).
  • A problem with updating the remote GBIC info caused a SW exception, this issue is now resolved (wi00824536).
  • Some times rebooting the non-base unit caused a broadcast storm on remaining DMLT links (wi00496279)
  • The Dynamic ARP inspection/DHCP snooping blocked certain clients during PXE boot (wi00692082).
  • The Switch becomes unresponsive when displaying PIM configuration (wi00555038).

As always I strongly suggest you review the release notes if you are interested in deploying 6.1.5 to your production network.

Cheers!

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