Posts tagged Nortel

Is Nortel on the rebound?

3
May 27, 2008
by Michael McNamara in

It sure looks that way these past few weeks. I generally try to keep all the posts here very technical and absent of opinion but there’s been a lot of attention lately on how Nortel appears to be starting to emerge from the watery hole it’s been in for the past six years. While their product lines for the enterprise have been fairly successful, Nortel has struggled financially ever since the 2002 dot-com financial bust.

We utilize both Nortel and Motorola at my current place of employment, and have done so for the the past 12 years, ever since I started with the organization. Six months ago I was asked, “what will happen with our data, voice and wireless networks if Nortel and/or Motorola go under?” It was and still is a very valid question from an enterprise standpoint. My answer was simple and straightforward, “we’ll cross that bridge when and if we come to it”.

nortel_energyIt would seem that Nortel has recently decided to take off the gloves and come out swinging with a very big marketing campaign around their lower power consumption.

Larry Dignan posted an article entitled, “Can Nortel pull an AMD on Cisco?”

Jason Hiner posted an entry on his blog entitled, “Nortel claims that it is siphoning network customers away from Cisco“.

While there might be some “inflated” marketing claims in Nortel’s pitch it would appear that the basic claims are true and accurate. There were some interesting videos posted on YouTube from the recent Interop 2008 convention.

I will say that I have been very happy with both Nortel and Motorola. They have provided cost effective, reliable solutions for some very demanding business critical applications.

I would also agree that Cisco makes some really great products. It just seems that they need a few competitors to keep them honest these days with respect to price and service.

You can see “The Nortel Tax Relief Plan” for yourself.

Cheers!

ISC DHCP Server (Nortel VoIP)

16
January 26, 2008
by Michael McNamara in

I’ve received quite few messages from folks trying to setup and configure the ISC DHCP server that often comes bundled with all the major Linux distributions for Nortel Internet Telephony. Nortel has several “Technical Configuration Guides” that outline how to configure Microsoft’s DHCP Server but I don’t believe they ever discuss the ISC DHCP server.

I will admit that I really don’t use the ISC DHCP server these days. We’ve been using Lucent’s VitalQIP IP Management software to manage our internal BOOTP/DHCP/DNS/DDNS needs for the past 10 years.

However, since there was so much interest I decided to setup a lab (at home) with a i2002 phone and a server running CentOS v5.0. I installed dhcp-3.0.5-7.el5 via YUM and came up with a sample dhcpd.conf file that anyone should be able to modify to meet their specific needs.

#
# DHCP Server Configuration file.
#   see /usr/share/doc/dhcp*/dhcpd.conf.sample
#
# Sample dhcpd.conf file for Nortel Internet Telephony
#
# Notes: example dhcpd.conf file to illustrate how to configure Nortel
# Internet Telephone specific DHCP options for i2002/i2004 Internet
# Telephones and 2210/2211 Wireless Phones.
#
# *** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING ** WARNING ***
#
# This is just an sample file with specific IP information. You'll
# need to customize this file to your specific IP address scheme
# before you can use it in your environment.
#
# *** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING ** WARNING ***
#

ddns-update-style none;
not authoritative;

option nortel-callserver code 128 = string;
option nortel-2245 code 151 = ip-address;

# Vendor Class for i2002/i2004/1120e/1140e/1150e Internet Telephones
class "Nortel-i2004-A" {
match if substring (option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 14) = "Nortel-i2004-A";
option nortel-callserver "Nortel-i2004-A,192.168.200.2:4100,1,5;192.168.200.2:4100,1,5.";
option vendor-class-identifier "Nortel-i2004-A";
next-server 192.168.0.10;
}

# Vendor Class for 2210/2211 Wireless Phones
class "Nortel-221x-A" {
match if substring(option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 13) = "Nortel-221x-A";
option nortel-callserver "Nortel-i2004-A,192.168.200.2:4100,1,5:192.168.200.2:4100,1,5.";
option nortel-2245 192.168.200.25;
option vendor-class-identifier "Nortel-221x-A";
next-server 192.168.0.10;
}

# Network Definition
shared-network "mynetwork" {
 subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
 option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
 option routers 192.168.0.1;
 option domain-name "acme.org";
 option domain-name-servers 192.168.0.1;
 default-lease-time 28800;
 max-lease-time 86400;

   # IP Address Pool for generic devices
   pool {
      range 192.168.0.50 192.168.0.100;
      deny members of "Nortel-i2004-A";
      deny members of "Nortel-221x-A";
   }

   # IP Address Pool for i2002/i2004/1120e/1140e/1150e
   pool {
      range 192.168.0.150 192.168.0.175;
      allow members of "Nortel-i2004-A";
      deny members of "Nortel-221x-A";
   }

   # IP Address Pool for 2210/2211
   pool {
      range 192.168.0.176 192.168.0.199;
      deny members of "Nortel-i2004-A";
      allow members of "Nortel-221x-A";
      }
 }
}

In the example above I setup two DHCP scopes; one for the standard hardwired Nortel Internet Telephones (Nortel-i2004-A) and another for the Nortel Wireless Phones (Nortel-221x-A). Hopefully this example should be fairly easy to follow just remember to edit all the site specific IP information.

Cheers!

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