Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

It’s the networks fault #1

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network_cable_by_tootallAs you may have noticed I’ve been extremely busy lately both with work and with my personal life. I thought I’d start a series of news or tidbit posts – the topics usually don’t deserve a post on their own but they are topics that I’d like to comment about or solicit feedback about. A simple name would have been Items of Interest or something along those lines. However, that’s just too boring for me and since I heard the phrase “It’s the networks fault” three different times today I thought what a great name. So the name of these posts won’t have anything to-do with the actual topics… which is the same relationship the network actually had to the three problems I heard about this morning, perfect irony if you ask me. You can join me on twitter.. hash tag #ITNF

We have a winner! – Avaya Sweepstakes

We had a pretty good response to the sweepstakes we ran over on the discussion forums last month. In the end Hugo from Quebec Canada was our lucky winner. Thanks to everyone for participating and congratulations to Hugo, we hope you enjoy the iPad2 WiFi+3G! Thanks to Avaya for (unofficially) sponsoring this event. It’s exciting to see that there are folks within Avaya that are still very passionate about their products and willing to step up and support both the products and their customers.

Avaya’s New Look

As you may of may not have noticed by now there’s a new look over at the Avaya website and the support website. I’m pretty impressed with the short time I’ve already spent on the support site. The search function is refreshingly quick and fairly thorough. It’s easy to quickly find the product your looking for by browsing through the “Products” menu so by just searching for it.

Unfortunately it looks like they used different field names for the user login, so Firefox couldn’t fill in the field. :(

I generally like it… what do you think?

If your a member of the discussion forums head on over and post your thoughts in this thread. If your not a member why not register, it’s free!

UNIStim Software Release 5.4 for IP Deskphones

Avaya has released UNIStim firmware 5.4 for their IP deskphones;

  • 0621C8L for the 2007 IP deskphone
  • 0623C8L, 0624C8L, 0625C8L, 0627C8L, 0626C8L for the 1110, 1120E, 1140E, 1150E and 1165E IP deskphones
  • 062AC8L for the 1200 series IP deskphones

As always I recommend you review the release notes for all the details.

The following fixes are included in this release;

  • wi00966639 External – Intermittent issue where the 1100 Series IP Deskphones fail to open socket resulting in no speech path.
  • wi00926866 External – PC authentication with 802.1x (EAPOL) does not work if IP Deskphone re-registers to TPS after a Network failure.
  • wi00960325 External – LLDP Time to Live expiration – an error message is displayed, but pressing any key enables the set to work as expected. (SR# 1-2340185912)

I know I’ve personally observed the “LLDP TTL Expired” message on my IP phones and I recall quite a few comments from a number of readers.

Cheers!

When it rains it pours!

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firealarmI’m not talking out the song by 50 Cent… I’m talking about those days when you ask yourself, “when is the insanity going to end”!

I’m going to get on my soapbox here so I’m warning everyone right now. It’s no secret that I believe Nortel has some great products but I’m not a fan boy by any stretch of the imagination, ask my Nortel sales representative. I’m sitting here tonight asking myself what is up with the software on the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 8600. In the past four days I’ve experienced three priority 1 (network down) issues, one priority 2 (network severely impacted) issue at three physical locations all involving Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 8600s.

I had thought that 4.1.8.x software was the savior of the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 8600. Those of us who have been around know the headaches that 4.1.6.x brought. Add to that Nortel removing 5.1 and 5.1.1 from their website and I’m left scratching my head wondering what’s going on. Next week Nortel is suppose to be coming in to discuss the new features in 7.x software, I’m still waiting for something in the 4.x and 5.x branch that’s reliable and rock solid.

A few weeks back I discovered the now infamous ARP issue on a ERS 8600 switch cluster running 4.1.8.0 software. Until that time it was believed (by myself anyway) that the ARP issue was resolved in 4.1.8.x software. The resolution was a reboot of the affected ERS 8600 core switch, thankfully since they were completely redundant to each other the reboot wasn’t visible to our customers.

This week has been the equivalent of hell week. On Tuesday we discovered a closet ERS 8600 switch (4.1.6.3) flooding the network with ARP packets at a rate of 500 per second. On Wednesday we had that same closet ERS 8600 switch introduce a loop in the network at 4:00AM in the morning, thankfully rate limiting was able to limit the packet flow and CP-Limit was able to isolate the closet by shutting down the uplinks to the affected closet. Later Wednesday morning we had a core ERS 8600 switch (v4.1.8.3) stop routing packets on a 10Gbps 8683XLR interface, unfortunately OSPF wasn’t told about the problem can continuing to route all WAN packets to a blackhole. Later Wednesday afternoon we had another core ERS 8600 switch (v4.1.8.0) where an 8684GTR card decided to up and restart on us.

I’ve always been cautious against building overly complicated networks for the simple reason that those designs themselves can introduce more downtime and issues than just taking a simpler approach. In this case stability and reliability are becoming major concerns of mine with respect to the Ethernet Routing Switch 8600.

What experience have you had with the Ethernet Routing Switch 8600?

Cheers!

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