Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

WordPress Theme Change

by

I had been growing tired of the old WordPress theme for some time so it was time for a change.

Thanks to Richard ‘Jodi’ Maxwell for his time and efforts constructing the “Nearly-Sprung”  WordPress theme.

I have some cleanup to-do around the code but it doesn’t look too bad right now. I like the earthy green tones, hopefully it will inspire folks to think green as they design and construct future data centers and networks.

I’m also working toward adding some decent search capability into the site with the help of Google Search. I know a lot of folks have had issues finding some of the different articles (including myself) and this will hopefully resolve that problem.

Cheers!

Nortel files for bankruptcy

by

Yes it is unfortunately true but it’s not the end of the world, not today anyway.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a media frenzy over any company such as I’ve seen with Nortel. All kidding aside I’ve received no fewer than 25 e-mail messages today from folks outside my organization concerning the Nortel news (I won’t even mention how many messages were flying around internally). At first came the trade magazines with their “newsletters” and then came the vendor/reseller solicitations (as if my Nortel network was about to implode by 12:00PM noon if I didn’t contact them).

networkworld-jan142009Just looking over at Network World I spotted approximately 14 stories related to the Nortel bankruptcy. Is there really that much news that we need 14 stories dedicated to the subject?

The real story here… how is Nortel’s current customer base going to react to the news. Is this the beginning of the end for Nortel or will it be the revitalizing step that Nortel needs to finally come out from under the haze that’s been hanging over it since the dot-com bust in 2001.

I’m sure a few folks have taken notice of the current poll on the left side of this page; What vendor would you use for Enterprise LAN/WAN switching if Nortel disappeared tomorrow?

Where do we as customers go from here… as if there wasn’t enough to-do now we need to tackle the larger question of what’s the risk to my organization if I’m using Nortel equipment and if I’m reliant on Nortel support.

It’s obvious that Cisco is the market leader but how’s does Cisco stand up on price and support compared to Hewlett Packard (HP), Juniper, Foundry, etc. These are all questions quite a few of us are going to be struggling with over the next few weeks and months.

Links of interest include;

http://www.nortel.com/corporate/restructuring.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090114.wnortelstaff0114/BNStory/Technology/home

Cheers!

Update: Thursday January 15, 2008

Now that the inital frenzy is over and the sugar kick has worn off Network World is now reporting “Nortel customers staying the course – for now“.

Home Desktop Upgrade 2008

by

intelq9550I know your asking “who cares” but it’s a blog and not every post needs to be totally useful. In this case I thought I would just spew about my latest desktop creation, yes I still build my own PCs and overclock them as well.

Over the holidays I upgraded my PC by replacing the motherboard, CPU and memory. I also stepped up from Windows XP to Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit) and I jumped back to an Intel platform from previously using AMD.

I used the following components:

I can honestly say that I’m quite pleased with how everything has turned out. I still play a few games here and there (Left 4 Dead is just awesome and I’m a big fan of Steam) and the DX10 support in Vista is just amazing on the eVGA 8800GTS that I reused from my previous system.  There was only one small issue that I encountered that involves the rear audio jacks from the RealTek HD Audio codec which I believe is a Windows Vista 64-bit driver problem since the audio hardware works with Ubuntu Live.

I also stumbled upon Windows Media Center and I have to honestly say that I’m very impressed. I ripped a few of my favorite DVDs to my hard disk and had my own on-demand library right there on my own PC.

I’m sure there will be a few folks scratching there heads asking why this bloat didn’t just purchase an Intel Core i7 processor inplace of the older Intel Core 2 processor. Honestly, while the price of the each processor was in line with the other the motherboard and memory were much more expensive for the Core i7 platform.

Cheers!

Update: January 22, 2009

I was finally able to resolve the audio issue by installing the latest drivers (v2.14) from the RealTek website for the “High Definition Audio Codec”.

Motorola WS5100 and RFS7000 and Wi-NG v1.3

by

Motorola has released software v3.3 for the WS5100 and v1.3 for the RFS7000 Wireless LAN Switches. This is v1.3 release of their Wi-NG software for Motorola’s Enterprise-class RF & Wireless Switches.

You can find the release notes for the 3.3 (WS5100) software release here. And you can find the release notes for the 1.3 (RFS7000) software release here.

I hope to provide some feedback in the coming weeks.

Cheers!

UNIStim Firmware Release 3.1 for Nortel IP phones

by

call_center_corp_red_32bitWe’ve been running on a very old version of firmware for the i2002, i2004, i2007, 1140e and 1150e for sometime now. We initially put a lot of time and effort assisting Nortel with troubleshooting the LLDP/ADAC integration between the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switches and the Nortel IP telephones. We had been running 0604DBG on the i2002 and i2004 models for the past 24 months with great success on about 350+ phones.

We have another large IP phone deployment coming up in the next few months and thought it would be a good time to upgrade prior to deploying potentially another 300+ IP phones.

We’ve just started upgrading our Data Center (our testbed if you will) with the latest firmware.

  • 0604DCG for Phase II IP Phones (2001, 2002 & 2004),
  • 0621C6H for IP Phone 2007,
  • 0623C6J, 0624C6J, 0625C6J and 0627C6J for IP Phone 1110, 1120E, 1140E and 1150E respectively
  • 062AC6J for IP Phone 1210, 1220, and 1230

I’m happy to report that everything appears to be working properly. The regular i2002 and i2004 handsets work fine. The 1140e works fine with the Plantronics Bluetooh headset and the 1150es still work fine in our three call centers. We are using LLDP/ADAC with all of our phones as a way to standardize their configuration. We utilize CRQM for Contact Recording and that seemed to work fine along with Contact Center 6.0 when used with the 1150e phones.

We did have one or two problems with the Default PVID changing on the Nortel ERS 5520 switch after the upgrade (power cycle). I initially thought it was related to our previous experiences with ADAC which I discussed in this post. However, this problem only involved the PVID and not the entire VLAN so additional testing will probably be required to try and isolate this issue.

I have yet to test either of the new provisioning options, including the new DHCP option (“Nortel-i2004-B”)  or the new “Info Block” files retrieved over TFTP. I talked about the new DHCP options when firmware 2.3 was released back in May 2008.  I’m curious if either of these options will help ease the initial configuration of the IP handsets.

You can find the release notes for the Nortel UNIStim Release 3.1 here.

Cheers!
[ad name=”ad-articlefooter”]

Recent Posts

Categories

SUBSCRIBE BY EMAIL