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!

Here we go again… there were so many great articles, just not enough space or time to link to them all.

Articles

DDoS Attack on Bank Hid $900,000 Cyberheist by Brian Kerbs. Here’s another cyberhist story from Brian although this time the criminals used a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to try and delay the discovery of their crime. It’s important to note that while consumer accounts are generally protected by law from any financial loss, business accounts aren’t afforded the same protections.

Mandiant APT Report – This report from Mandiant on Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) essentially fingers China and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for directly carrying out an outgoing cyber war since 2007. I found it really interesting how researchers were able to use the Anonymous hack of HBGary Federal back in 2011 to identify two of the key players.

Packet Pushers Show 136: Avaya – Considerations for Turning Your Network Into an Ethernet Fabric – Sponsored – Our friends Ethan and Greg had some discussions with Avaya and some Avaya customers around their Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) deployments. Avaya is utilizing SPB in their VENA architecture which has really started to gain traction among Avaya (formerly Nortel) customers.

vSphere DR/HA: Stretched Cluster or SRM–which is better/simpler/cheaper? by Chad Sakac which was followed up by a retort of sorts by Duncan Epping entitled, SRM vs Stretched Cluster solution /cc @sakacc. I’ve had to work through this dilemma myself. I’m currently employing Veeam to replicate virtual guests between data centers and it’s working fairly well, although it too has it’s limitations.

OpenStack Isn’t Our Savior from Lock-In or Support Costs by Bob Plankers which was followed up by a retort blog post by Greg Ferro titled, Response: OpenStack Isn’t Our Savior From Lock-in or Support Costs — the Lone Sysadmin. I read these two blog posts as more of a discussion around the costs of utilization open source software in an enterprise. Is it more cost effective to utilize an open source solution over a commercial offering in the enterprise space? In the service provider space it would seem that open source can certainly be more cost effective (look at hosting providers leveraging Xen). However, enterprises usually don’t operate on the same scale as service providers so is open source more cost effective?

Software Releases

Avaya Virtual Services Platform 7000 v10.2

Avaya has released v10.2 for the VSP 7000, their 10GE top of rack 1U switch adding features

• SPBM and IS-IS
• CFM
• SMLT
• Rear port mode
• Fiber Fabric Interconnect cables
• Egress queue shaping
• PFC-lite
• CANA
• Out-of-band management
• Feature licenses
• IPFIX
• Trace
• Change RADIUS password
• RADIUS use management IP
• DHCP snooping
• Dynamic ARP inspection
• IP Source Guard
• Unicast storm control
• MAC address-based security
• MAC flash
• FDB Disable MAC Learning
• FDB Static MAC Entry
• IP routing
• IGMP Profiles
• IGMP Multicast Flood Control
• TDR

You should check out the release notes for all the details.

Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 8600/8800 v7.1.5.2

Avaya has released v7.1.5.2 for the Ethernet Routing Switch 8600/8800 series.

The following list of issues have been resolved;

• In ACLI mode, configuring an ospf area range summary for the default area and saving the configuration results in an invalid saved configuration as the context was not set correctly to “router ospf” [ wi01066179 ]
• When an IST link is physically removed, the IST does not recover if the link is left down for more than 8 minutes. [ wi01055421 ]
• Default routes that are redistributed to another VRF are not correctly installed when the ERS is rebooted. These error messages are logged: “COP-SW ERROR ercdProcArpRecMsg: Failed to Add Arp Record for IP <address> IO<slot>0x000005e8 00000000”, “GlobalRouter SW ERROR Invalid tPORT: 0 for getLpidFromPort conversion!!” [ wi01054153 ]
• When a configured default route’s next hop is not in the global VRF, inserting a line card results in error messages and the route is not correctly installed and following error messages are logged: “COP-SW ERROR ercdAddEcmpDefaultRoute: Arp rcdRadixLookup failed”, “ercdProcArpRecMsg: Failed to Add ECMP Default Route [ wi01058481 ]
• The error message “Stop polling DI Power Supply due to excessive i2c error; fan temp=0” would be seen in system running 8895 and DI Power supplies. In systems with 8895 CPs, there is a potential for the I2C bus to get stalled. This could result in peripheral devices on the I2C bus becoming unreachable from the CPU [ wi01058836 ] Traffic does not pass between a server with Intel 10G NIC connected to 8812 after the server is rebooted [ wi01051880 ]
• Port does not initialize correctly with a 100Base FX SFP and the following message is reported: “KHI Warning Port <number> is experiencing Packet Errors, FCS Errors” [ wi01066167 ]
• Under high levels of multicast traffic, the 8630GBR experienced resets due to false packet memory refresh errors [ wi01064252 ] The default trace level for Infinity module was set to VERY_TERSE instead of NO_DISPLAY [ wi01039790 ]
• Once the ERS is configured with the feature of sending “ICMP destination unreachable” packets, disabling the feature has no effect [ wi01072132 ]
• When the last port of a spanning tree group is removed via ACLI and added to another group, when the configuration is saved, all ports are added to both the old and new spanning tree groups [ wi01075387 ]

You should check out the release notes for all the details.

Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 v6.2.6

Avaya has released v6.2.6 for the Ethernet Routing Switch 5000 series.

The following list of issues have been resolved;

• Few Static Routes disappeared when upgrading from secure 6.0.5.029 to secure 6.2.4.011 (wi01040359)
• Partial Configuration loss – EDM help file path is missing (wi01067058)
• ERS5632 6.2.4.010 Ping loss to a VRRP Virtual IP address from or behind the SMLT edge switch (wi01042827)
• ERS55xx Shared Copper ports do not retain the duplex setting post reboot (wi01047190)
• ERS5632 directed ARP request is dropped by the switch (wi01051136)
• When using EDM Onbox, if the column size is larger than the pop-up window size, the pop-up window does not open properly (wi00993403)
• Custom Banner doesn’t show at login page in EDM (wi01020605)
• Cannot delete VLAN port name once it is configured (wi01060438)
• Copper SFP ports on 5632 fail to come up after upgraded to 6.2.5 software (wi01044351)
• Ports with 100BASE-FX SFP always do not link up in 6.2.5 (wi01059314)

You should check out the release notes for all the details.

Cheers!