Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

LLDP with Cisco 3750

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ciscologoNortel has released a Technical Configuration Guide designed to assist technical users configuring Nortel IP Phones connected to Cisco switches. The document makes specific references to the Cisco 3750 switch but the commands will apply to any Cisco switch that supports that specific feature.

I applaud Nortel for for making these Technical Configuration Guides available to users. It helps to broaden Nortel’s product reach and it empowers Nortel users to understand the different configuration options. I’d like to see Nortel get these documents indexed by Google or even there own internal Knowledgebase search engine.

In short you can use LLDP (802.1ab) on a Cisco 3750  to configure the Voice VLAN much the same way as you might on a Nortel ERS5520 switch using ADAC/LLDP. For those Cisco shops that are using Nortel Succession for voice this should be a welcome capability.

As in the past I’m going to post the document on my website;

http://www.michaelfmcnamara.com/files/ClientsInteropCisco_L2_1.1.pdf

As I’ve commented in the past it’s quite possible that Nortel may object to my “copying” of these documents. The goal is to make them readily available to Nortel users and allow them to be indexed by Google. I believe there are now quite a few Nortel corporate folks and engineers reading this blog, please contact me if you have concerns about me posting these documents.

Cheers!

Nortel files for bankruptcy

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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“.

UNIStim Firmware Release 3.1 for Nortel IP phones

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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!
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Issue with Nortel 8692SF and 8005AC Power Supplies

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Here’s another one that I’ve personally seen and I think folks need to hear about.  Nortel has just revised this technical bulletin that was originally released in March 2008 concerning issues with their 8692SF (CPU) for the ERS 8600 chassis and the new 8005AC power supplies for that chassis. If you have non-E, E, or M cards in your ERS 8600 chassis with an 8692SF and 8005AC power supply you should check the hardware version of the 8692SF.

Unfortunately the bulletin makes reference to December31, 2008 as the expiration of the replacement program for folks that don’t have a support contract.

You would never expect a switch to not initialize properly on a hardware reboot would you? That’s exactly what can happen and I’ve seen the problem on a number of occasions since we upgraded all our core ERS 8600 switches about two years ago with 8005AC power supplies to support the new R modules.

Cheers!

VLACP on a Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch Stack

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I’ve seen quite a few issues with VLACP on the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switches but now Nortel has released a technical bulletin documenting a known issue when running VLACP on their stackable switches (ERS2500, ERS4500, ERS5500, ERS5600) with their chassis based ERS8300 and ERS8600 switches.

The bulletin advises users to re-configure the VLACP timeout from a default value of 3 to 5.

5520-48T-PWR(config)#interface fastEthernet 5-6
5520-48T-PWR(config-if)#vlacp timeout-scale 5
5520-48T-PWR(config-if)#show vlacp interface 5-6
===============================================================================
VLACP Information
===============================================================================
PORT ADMIN OPER HAVE FAST SLOW TIMEOUT TIMEOUT ETH MAC
ENABLED ENABLED PARTNER TIME TIME TYPE SCALE TYPE ADDRESS
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5 true true yes 500 30000 short 5 8103 00:00:00:00:00:00
6 true true yes 500 30000 short 5 8103 00:00:00:00:00:00

The bulletin also refers to a software fix in ERS 2500 v4.2.1, ERS4500 v5.2.1 and ERS5500/5600 v6.0.2 or later maintenance releases.

We really only use VLACP as a means of detecting FEFI when the switch equipment doesn’t support autonegotiation (example; Nortel Ethernet Switch 470 doesn’t support autonegotiation on the 1000Mbps uplinks).

Cheers!

Update: Friday February 13, 2009

It seems that Nortel has released software 6.0.3 for the Ethernet Routing Switch 5500/5600 series switches. This release is suppose to resolve the VLACP issues that were reported in the earlier bulletin. Here’s an excerpt from the release notes;

A feature enhancement (Q01645430) that changed the VLACP interoperability behavior with Passport 8600 was removed. For further details, please see the Technical Support Bulletin ID. 2008009238, Rev 1, published on 2008-12-12.

Cheers!

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