It’s the networks fault #10

We’re back again with another edition….

Articles

HTML5 VIDEO bytes on iOS by Steve Sounders- I enjoy following Steve’s in-depth analysis. I often end up doing my own reverse engineering while trying to determine why something is broken or why it doesn’t work properly.

The Importance of Watching the Wire by Jeremy Stretch – Jeremy is well known within the community and his posts are very insightful. Just last week I had to put asside HttpWatch and look at a packet trace utilizing WireShark to determine what servers a custom Silverlight component was trying to communicate with.

How to Encrypt Your Nifty MiniDrive by Stephen Foskett – Stephen demonstrates how he encrypts his MiniDrive using Mac OS X’s built-in full disk encryption. In this day and age I highly recommend that everyone encrypt their portable storage devices, be it those portable hard drives or the USB flash keys. If you have a laptop you might also want to consider a full disk encryption solution to protect the data in case your laptop is lost or stolen. I personally use AxCrypt for individual files and TrueCrypt for volume encryption.

SDN Is Tomorrows Reality but You Will Love It When It Gets Here – CloudCamp London by Greg Ferro – Greg shares the slides he presented at CloudCamp London and provides a very brief (only 5 minutes – WoW) but concise delve into Software Defined Networking (SDN) and how it will revolutionize networking.

Software Releases

Avaya Virtual Services Platform 9000 v3.3.3.0

Avaya has release v3.3.3.0 for their VSP 9000 switch. While there are no new features in this release there are a large number of resolved bugs (issues) and a few “interesting” documented unresolved bugs (issues).

Please review the release notes for all the details.

Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 v6.3.1

Avaya has released v6.3.1 for their ERS 5000 series of switches.  There are three new features and a few bug fixes;

• Default IP
• Run IP Office Script
• SLAMon agent

The most interesting of these features (to me) is the SLAMon agent. Avaya released the SLAMon agent on the ERS 4000 series sometime back and is now catching up on the ERS 5000 series. I see a future blog post.

I’m currently running 6.2.6. on a large number of ERS 5632s, ERS 5520s and ERS 5530s (IST Clusters) without any issue.

Please review the release notes for all the details.

Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 4000 v5.6.3

Avaya has release v5.6.3 for their ERS 4000 series. There are two new features (see anything similar to above?) and a few bug fixes;

• Default IP
• Run IP Office Script

I personally ran into a very annoying bug resolved in this release.

wi01059920 – STP Learning: Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) learning does not change from disabled to normal on MultiLink Trunk (MLT) when MLT members are added to a new VLAN.

Anytime I would add a VLAN to the MLT of an edge closet the switch would enable STP on the MLT cause a brief 15-30 second outage as Spanning Tree went from Listening to Learning and eventually Forwarding. I ended up leaving Spanning Tree enabled on the MLT (it was disabled on the IST core switches). After I apply this upgrade, I can now go back and clean-up the configuration

Please review the release notes for all the details.

Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 8600/8800 v7.1.5.3

Avaya has released v7.1.5.3 for their ERS 8600/8800 switches. This is primarily a bug fix with no additional features.

I just recently deployed v7.1.5.2 on a very large IST cluster pair and things have been very stable. The actual upgrade from 5.1.7.0 to 7.1.5.2 was actually very uneventful which was itself a bit of a surprise. I also recently deployed 7.1.5.3 on 2 standalone ERS 8606 switches that are acting as 10GE WAN routers.

Please review the release notes for all the details.

Cheers!