technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony
The Nortel IP Phone 1165E hasn’t been officially announced just yet (no product information on the Nortel website) but here’s a marketing video posted to YouTube.
Perhaps a few folks at Nortel can fill us in on the technical specifications of this new product. While it looks like a great phone I’m not sure what functionality a business user might benefit from over the 1140E or 1120E?
Cheers!
Nortel recently released a highly technical document, Large Campus Technical Solution Guide, that should be a great benefit Nortel customers. This document covers an amazing amount of information and is a treasure trove to organizations looking for best practice approaches to managing and deploying their Nortel data equipment.
The document covers topics such as convergence between IP telephony and data networking, chassis versus stackable, Layer 2 versus Layer 3 at the edge, redundancy, high availability, clustering (IST/SMLT), two tier and three tier network designs, VLANs, Spanning Tree, Control Plane Rate Limit (cp-limit), Extended CP-Limit (ext-cp-limit), VLACP, SLPP, QoS, VRRP, RSMLT, ECMP, Multicast, EAPoL and the list goes on and on. And best of all they provide configuration examples for a large number of the scenarios which are always helpful.
A lot of the material I cover here in my blog is covered in this document. I’ll probably pull a few excerpts from this document over the next few months and make some posts out of it, expanding on some of the examples and filling in any unanswered blanks.
I’m impressed with effort that Nortel has made in trying to “get out the word”. This is really a great tool for Nortel customers! Let’s hope that Avaya will allow these folks to continue with their success.
Oh behalf of all those Nortel customers out there let me say “Thanks!”
Cheers!
Avaya has emerged from the weekend long bidding process as the winner in the auction of the Nortel Enterprise Division. Avaya will reportedly pay $900 million for Nortel up from their initial offer of $475 million.
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Well September 4, 2009 is almost upon us, and that date serves as the deadline to submit bids for Nortel’s Enterprise division.
While we really won’t know the true outcome until September 11 there are a flurry of stories concerning potential bidders. All About Nortel has a great post detailing the Siemens Gore angle.
Will it be Avaya? Will it be Siemens Gore? Will it be some other unknown party?
Only time will tell.
Nortel has released a technical bulletin notifying customers of an issue with the Nortel 6100 Series Wireless LAN handsets running software release 2.x (build 115.019 or earlier) when the phones are paired with battery packs that are manufactured around or after January 2009.
The phone will hang up displaying an I2C error when it first boots up. You can read all the details in the Nortel technical bulletin;
Nortel WLAN Handset 6100 Series Battery Error: “I2C” Battery Issue (Software Rls 2.x Fix – Build 115.021)
While I’m at it I should probably mention that Nortel has released software 115_021 and 115_022 for the Nortel 6100 series WLAN handsets. I personally had an issue with 115_021 after I upgraded a 6140 handset. The ear speaker wouldn’t work at all, not after resetting it, not after switching batteries, not after praying over it. I could place and receive calls and the speaker phone worked fine but I couldn’t even get dial tone out of the ear speaker in the handset. After upgrading to software release 115_022 the problem has not re-occurred.
In addition Nortel has also released v2.4 of the Handset Administration Tool (HAT). This tool allows you to configure the 6100 series phones through the cradle from a USB port. This tool is a godsend for those of us that remember configuring every phone by hand through the dial pad (you trying entering a 128bit WEP/WPA key through a dial pad and not get it wrong).
You can download the new software and the new version of HAT from Nortel;
http://support.nortel.com/go/main.jsp?cscat=SOFTWARE&poid=18281
Cheers!
Update: September 4, 2009
I went back and tested 115_021 software with another 6140 handset and had no problems. I also went back and downgraded the original 6140 handset I tested with from 115_022 to 115_021 and had no problems. I’m guessing it was a fluke of some kind.
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