There are obviously a lot of very knowledgeable people posting to this blog. While I think the material I’ve already posted is helpful I think there are a lot of other folks out there that could help. I’m currently contemplating starting a discussion forum (probably using phpBB) to help get these folks connected. While I recognize that there are quite a few existing discussion forums (Tek-Tips is one such forum) that provide a great environment I think a better job could be done to help nurture the participants and help keep the discussions on topic. I know that Nortel has some discussion forums of their own which are relatively new.
I get a LOT of personal email messages asking for help on various topics. While I try to respond to the vast majority of them I don’t always have the time (or energy). I’m thinking about the following forums;
- Nortel BayRS Routing
- Nortel Ethernet Switching
- Nortel Ethernet Routing Switching
- Nortel VPN Routing
- Nortel Succession 1000 Call Server
- Motorola Wireless LAN Switches
- Network Management
While it will probably mean some additional workload to get it up and running it could really help connect a lot of folks and could. I could also solicit a few experts to help moderate the different discussion forums and provide some high quality content.
Let me take a poll and see what you folks think. Please feel free to be brutally honest!
[poll id=”6″]
Cheers!
I think we should start a IRC channel/ Wiki… Just saying.
What about an email list… something like nsp list. http://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/
I use to subscribe to quite a few “listservers” in my early days. I don’t think I want to contribute to the SPAM problem. I personally believe RSS has brought us a long way from the old listserver days. Anyone remember BITNET?
Thanks for the feedback!
Why not leverage the nortel.com/community forums?
It’s an option to be sure, however, I have some concerns. I can’t be sure that those forums will be there in six months. And if they disappear so does the wealth of knowledge that might have been accumulated and the effort put forth to build that knowledge. Nortel was fairly late with the idea of opening their discussion forums so what’s to guarantee their existence? From an editorial perspective I’d also be concerned about how Nortel might censor various unfavorable content. I haven’t seen it done at Nortel yet but I’ve seen it done at a lot of “upstanding” organizations.
Thanks for the feedback Mark!
Why not use a content manger with integrated forum, like mkportal and smf? I use this setup on a number of websites for it’s ease of update etc etc, and they end up pretty much self-running. I’ve already been using some of you very useful tips from the blog, Roll on the forum!
Cheers,
Liam
Michael,
I agree also. We don’t know how long Nortel will last.
Let’s just create our own.
I like svl0r’s idea about structuring it as a wiki….Michael, does your web host support this?
Hello!! This is Mendes from Portugal!
I’d like to make you a simple question, if you could please respond:
I’d like to know if there is a way to open binary switches backup’s as if they were ascii backups (to see the command lines like in ascii case).
Could tou please help me?
Thank you!!
Hi Mendes,
There is no tool available (that I’m aware of) that will parse a binary configuration file for the Avaya/Nortel Ethernet Switches.
You realize that you can use the Ascii Configuration Generator (ACG) to get an ASCII representation of the current configuration correct?
The only way that I know would be to restore the binary configuration to a switch and then issue a “show running-configuration” from that switch.
Please use the discussion forums for any additional questions;
http://forums.networkinfrastructure.info/nortel-ethernet-switching/
Good Luck!
Hello!! Thank tou for the quick response!!
The thig is that in our network, we want no backup all switches configurations through ESM. But some switches seem to have problems when uploading the configurations is ascii format…
I Think Some of them don’t support the automatic backup in ascii and we can only receive the backup on the TFTP in binary format.
So there is no way to see the binary configuration files in ascii form, right?
Thank you!