Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

When will it end?

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nortel_globemark_blueLet’s see if there will be any announcements concerning Nortel’s Enterprise division come July 1, 2009.

It certainly seems that Nortel is literally done as all talk of restructuring their debt and emerging from bankruptcy have evaporated and the “everything must go” chant is flying about everywhere.

While it sounds like Nortel’s CDMA business and LTE R&D unit will go to Nokia Siemens pending the completion of the “stalking horse” deal, the jury is still out on Nortel’s Enterprise business although the rumors all point to Avaya as the front runner. If that comes to fruition it will be interesting to see how Avaya plans to transition existing customers away from legacy Nortel products to Avaya products. Or how long they will support the legacy Nortel software and/or equipment before they sunset it.

Is it time to jump ship yet… you might want to check that you have enough lifeboats.

Cheers!

Internet Utilization at 99.9% Arrgghhh!

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Man_on_phone_2I thought I would just share this short story with you all… it’s a classic case of what can happen even with the best of plans and intentions. We recently deployed Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.1.2 via Microsoft Active Directory Group Policy.

We rushed the deployment in order to address some of the recent Acrobat vulnerabilities that were being actively exploited in the wild by Nine-Ball and other trojans/malware. We noticed an unusual uptick in Internet utilization almost immediately after the package had been deployed. When we examined our Websense logs we found an extreme number of HTTP requests to swupd.adbobe.com. We determined that these requests were coming from Adobe software products that were attempting to check for an update via Adobe’s auto-update feature. The HTTP requests were being denied by our Blue Coat ProxySG appliances because we require user authentication to access the Internet. While the Adobe auto-update component was able to read the PAC file configured within Internet Explorer it was not able to provide authentication when challenged with a 407 response. We originally thought the sheer number of clients making requests was putting an undo burden on the system so we added some CPL code to our Blue Coat ProxySG appliances to allow non-authenticated access to *.adobe.com. Within minutes of that change the wheels on the bus came flying off literally.

We just happen to have two 50Mbps Ethernet links to the Internet being served from two Blue Coat ProxySG appliances with about 5,500 client PCs. Within minutes both ProxySG appliances went to 96% CPU utilization and both Internet links went to 99.9% utilization. We had literally let the cat out of the bag and it was off and running… the number of client PCs trying to download updates from Adobe surged and they literally started to choke our two Internet connections.

Thankfully the Blue Coat ProxySG appliances support bandwidth classes. We created a 1Mbps class and added some CPL code to bandwidth restrict access to *.adobe.com. While that proved to be the quick fix we’re also deploying an update via Group Policy to disable the auto-update feature per Adobe’s knowledgebase article.

Cheers!

Discussion forums anyone?

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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!

Nortel ERS 5000 Software 6.0.4 Available

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You’d never guess that Nortel is in bankruptcy with all the software releases that keep flying off the shelves.

Nortel has released software 6.0.4 for the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 series switches. The new “Health Monitor” features are designed to improve the stability of multiple switches running in a stack configuration. I also noticed that one problem reported here on this blog by a vistor has been resolved;

  • Static Route was lost upon reboot (Q01986043)

You can find the release notes at the Nortel website.

Cheers!

Nortel ERS 5500 Software 6.1 Available

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Nortel has released software 6.1for the Ethernet Routing Switch 5500/5600 series. Nortel has also released Java Device Manager 6.20 which provides support for managing switches running the newly released software.

There are a few features that I believe will be worth the effort to upgrade;

  • IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) licensing
    IP Flow Information Export functionality is now part of the base functionality of the Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 Series. A separate license for this functionality is no longer necessary.
  • Stack forced mode
    When you enable this feature in a stack of two switches, on the failure of a unit, the remaining switch retains the stack IP address ensuring continued management access to the remaining unit. When Stack Forced Mode is enabled if the base unit remains, then AUR, AAUR and DAUR ensures that when a replacement unit is added to the base unit it is correctly provisioned.

There are also a large number of bug fixes which I really won’t go into here. One note of caution, you’ll need to be running software release 6.0 in order to upgrade to software release 6.1, you’ll also need to upgrade the diagnostic agent.

You can find the complete release notes on Nortel’s website.

Cheers!

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