Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Nortel is no more…

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Image credit NetworkWorld

I’ve been searching Google for the past few days waiting to see who one the Nortel IP asset sale,  and there was very little information until late yesterday when Nortel announced in a  press release that the sale and auction had been completed.

“After a multi-day auction, a consortium emerged as the winning bidder with a cash purchase price of US$4.5 billion. The consortium consists of Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion and Sony”.

Interestingly enough it looks like Google was left walking away from the table without anything.

Cheers!

Will Google acquire the last bits of Nortel?

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It would seem that the end is very near now for what’s left of Nortel. The sale and auction of the Nortel’s vast patent portfolio is scheduled for today, Monday June 27, 2011. As you probably already heard Google submitted a $900 million “stalking horse” bid for the portfolio back in May. Since that announcement there have been a number of interesting stories, including Microsoft and AT&T going to court on June 13 to argue that a “free and clear” patent sale would hurt the whole industry. On June 16 Nortel moved the scheduled auction date from June 20 to June 27 siting a significant level of interest in its approximately 6,000 patents and patent applications. Then on June 23 Apple apparently stepped into the fray with the blessing of U.S. anti-trust regulators.

I’m sure there are going to be quite a few other companies involved which we haven’t heard from yet.

Anyone wager to place any guesses?

Cheers!

Avaya VPN Client Release 10.04.109 for Windows 7

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Avaya has released version 10.04.109 of their VPN client that supports both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7. This single client supports the following operating systems (in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions);

  • Windows XP
  • Windows Vista
  • Windows 7

The following issues have been identified and resolved according the the release notes;

  • wi00875648 – Certificates with UTF-8 encoded issuer name can’t be selected.
  • wi00875671 – Sometimes users might get “Unhandled exception” error when trying to select a certificate or display its details.
  • wi00875676 – Pre-application launch command line not saved properly.

In the past I attempted to host the client files and I quickly ate through my 40 GB/monthly quota on my host. I’m going to attempt to-do this again however I will most likely change the URL from time to time to guarantee that people aren’t hot-linking to it.

I may also restrict access to only ARIN based IP addresses, again I’ll have to see how things go the second time around.

Cheers!

Updated Saturday May 7, 2011

I’ve added MD5 hashes for both the files.

Updated Tuesday September 20, 2011

Avaya has release version 10.05.100 which can be found here, I’m going to close comments on this post.

UNIStim Firmware Release 5.0 for IP Deskphones

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Avaya has released UNIStim firmware 5.0 for their IP deskphones;

  • 0621C8A for the 2007 IP deskphone
  • 0623C8A, 0624C8A, 0625C8A, 0627C8A, 0626C8A for the 1110, 1120E, 1140E, 1150E and 1165E IP deskphones
  • 062AC8A for the 1200 series IP deskphones

This release of firmware adds support for the following features;

  • Support for wideband (G.722) codecs on 1120E, 1140E, 1150E, 1165E, 1220, and 1230 IP Deskphones.
  • Support for Avaya Notification Solution (ANS) and Avaya Push API which provides the ability to push text, graphics, and audio messages to 1100 Series, 1200 Series and the 2007 IP Deskphones.
  • Support for a Wireless Markup Language (WML) browser for 1140E, 1150E, and 1165E IP Deskphones.

Product Advisement for UNIStim 5.0 related to Zero Touch Provisioning:

For customers who have pre-configured the REG entries (which includes the MAC address, the TN, and Node) within the provisioning file to enable Zero Touch for the IP Deskphones, be advised that a problem can occur related to parsing of the REG entry that may result in the IP Deskphones not coming up as expected, and instead continuing to reboot when UNIStim 5.0 is loaded onto the units. The issue will impact IP Deskphones that have been pre-configured for Zero Touch and where the REG lines still exist in the REG entry. This is a known issue that will impact IP Deskphones that have a matching MAC address already pre-configured in the REG entry. This issue will be fully addressed in the upcoming UNIStim 5.1 maintenance release expected in March 2011, and customers may want to delay updating IP Deskphones and Call Servers until that time due to this issue.

In the interim, to avoid this issue the following workaround is recommended: Before loading UNIStim 5.0 onto the IP Deskphones, customers are advised to add a comma before the semi-colon of the REG entry. If UNIStim 5.0 is already loaded, and the issue exists (where the phones continue to reboot instead of coming up), the customer can then add a comma as specified above and the IP Deskphones will come up.

Example: reg= 0021e1ff59cb cs1k s1 3380 096 00 00 18,;

I also recently had a discussion with another telephony expert around the issues of running a PC at 100Mbps (connected to the IP phone) when the 1100 series IP phone is connected to the network via 1Gbps or vice-versa. Here’s the relevant blurb from the release notes that details the problem.

Throughput may be slow for large file transfers on conversions from GigE to 100Mbit (applies to the 1120E, 1140E, 1150E and 1165E IP Deskphones)

In networks in which a PC is connected to the IP Deskphone’s PC port and the PC’s NIC speed is 100Mbit but the network speed is at GigE, large file transfers to the PC can take quite a long time. This is an issue with large file transfers only. Due to the speed mismatch between the phone’s two ports the buffers in the phone can overflow resulting in retransmissions. Although the IP Deskphones support Ethernet flow control (802.3x), the support is only implemented on the phone’s PC port, not on the phone’s network port. Ethernet flow control is a mechanism were the IP Deskphone can request a brief “pause” from the transmitting Ethernet device if the IP Deskphone buffers are about to overflow.
Ethernet flow control cannot be implemented on the phone’s network port, since it impacts the phone’s voice quality. As a result, in environments were the network is GigE but the PC NIC is only 100Mbit, large file transfers from the network to the PC can take quite a long time. On the other hand, since Ethernet flow control is implemented on the phone’s PC port, in environments were the PC NIC is GigE but the network is only 100Mbits, large file transfers should be well managed by the phone’s Ethernet flow control mechanism.

You can find the release notes on Avaya’s website along with the actual firmware/software for the IP phones.

Cheers!

Avaya VPN Client Release 10.04.108 for Windows 7

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Avaya has released version 10.04.108 of their VPN client that supports both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7. This single client supports the following operating systems (in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions);

  • Windows XP
  • Windows Vista
  • Windows 7

The new client is now rebranded as the Avaya VPN Client, although the installation routine still bears the name “Nortel VPN Client” in the title bar and the desktop icon created by the installation gets the label “Nortel VPN Client”. The new client also supports a (completely) quiet installation;

Previously, when users install the client, they need to acknowledge UAC prompts before the installation can continue. If they do not want the UAC prompts to show up, they would have to manually install Avaya certificate to the Trusted Publisher store, or check on the “Always trust software from Avaya Inc.” during earlier installation NVC. In this release, a new option is introduced that the procedure can be automated. To use it, users will need to pass in “TrustAvaya=TRUE” (the “TRUE” must be in uppercase) to the installer at command line (in administrative context). For example,

C:\NVC32-10.04.108.exe /S /v”/qn TrustAvaya=TRUE”

or

C:\msiexec /i “Nortel VPN Client.msi” /qn TrustAvaya=TRUE

There are quite a few bugs resolved in this release including the following;

  • wi00568576 Wireless users are disconnected intermittently. IPSec users which are behind a wireless cable modem are disconnected intermittently. Users are able to authenticate successfully, but after some time they get disconnected and the client pops up the message “VPN tunnel is disconnected due to routing table change”. This is because the operating system changes the metric of wireless interface according to various parameters when Automatic Metric option is enabled. This is the default configuration for network interfaces in Windows. This causes the client to consider that the routing tabled has been hacked and disconnects the tunnel.
  • wi00595275 Screen Saver policy enforced at user level only. End user machine’s screen saver settings can be enabled at user level or group level (via Active Directory group policy). When the VPN client enforces the screen saver policy (pushed from server), it only checks the user level setting.
  • wi00595280 Unable to ping the local interface after a tunnel is disconnected. The issue occurs on Windows Vista/7 with mandatory tunneling only.
  • wi00666178 Inaccurate message when the QOTD banner message is not received. If the quote-of-the-day banner message gets lost (due to networking issue), the tunneling attempt failed with error message of “User did not acknowledge the banner”, which may confuse users. The message has been reworded as “The banner message from the VPN Router was not received, or the user didn’t acknowledge the banner. Please contact your Network Administrator or Helpdesk for assistance.”
  • wi00823633 On Windows XP the client fails to start if only Microsoft .NET 4.0 is available. On machines that have only .NET Framework v4.0 but no v3.5 or earlier versions available, the client fails to start.
  • wi00840078 Local IP address is unreachable on Windows 7. On Windows 7/Vista, when a tunnel is up (in mandatory tunneling mode), the local host IP address is not accessible.
  • wi00595473 Preconfigured profiles were not displayed in some cases.
  • wi00841234 NVC GUI takes very long time to launch up when using IPSec profiles having saved passwords.
  • wi00827126 Certificate based SSL tunneling fails when EACA (NHA/TG) is enabled. When Avaya EAC Agent (formerly Nortel Health Agent or TunnelGuard) is enabled, certificate-based SSL tunneling attempt will fail with error of “Banner fetching failed.”
  • wi00830401 On Windows 7/Vista the DNS settings for the VPN connection is not used if the connection is through a mobile broadband card connection. It’s an issue with the operating system’s DNS resolution. Please use Microsoft’s workaround described here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;311218
  • wi00841109 Occasionally tunneling attempts may fail with error of “Activating VPN adapter failed” error is displayed.
  • wi00841089 Sometimes the log clear function doesn’t work. The log shows there are query errors.

A number of readers posted comments to the previous software release, Nortel VPN Client Release 10.04.016, around the first issue above where users were getting disconnected with the following message; VPN tunnel is disconnected due to routing table change. If you don’t feel like upgrading the client you can implement a workaround provided by a reader.

You can find the complete release notes right here.

You can find the client software on the Avaya support website.

I’m going to make the AVC software available here unless I’m contacted by Avaya.

NVC64-10.04.108.exe (64bit)
NVC32-10.04.108.exe (32bit)

Cheers!

Updated Sunday April 10, 2011

I can no longer host the Avaya VPN client software do to the enormous bandwidth utilization on my host. In addition there are just too many people abusing my gesture. I had a single IP address from China download the client software so many times that it consumed 10GB of bandwidth.

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