Stop!
VERY OLD Pm2e's have some problem which causes the box to lose part of
its mind when upgraded to 3.3.2. Along with the S0 problem which can
be solved by reformatting, there is also a problem the Ethernet MAC
address changing to some constant value. If you notice the bad
MAC address, the box REQUIRES RMAing to fix.
Megazone, if you don't know about this, PLEASE look up RMA 5141
in your records. This is one of the boxes we sent in for this
condition. Some engineer at Livinston gave my boss the reason
why this happens to older boxes at Interop. I need to find out
from him.
So, if you're having problems, check your MAC address!
Now, on all our newer boxes, we have had no problems in upgrading.
So, aside from the hardware, things have been happy.
> Like people who
> started getting weird local IPs for users - they must have had some random
> bits misplaced that were in areas not used for 3.3.1 or prior, and when they
> loaded 3.3.2 or up suddently those bits were sitting in the middle of a user
> data structure.
I would question an upgrade program that didn't first "memset"
usable memory addresses to a known state.
> If it
> hits all the machines at the site, I suspect the configuration and/or
> environment first - the odds of that happening are so ridiculously low that
> there must be a common fault native to that site.
In the case of Msen, who's been in the ISP business for 5 years,
it was the fact we had older PM's. The support tech's *are* checking
for the MAC address problem, are they not?
> There is. If it detects an error during the upgrade it aborts. But 'data'
> is not considered an error, and the PM doesn't know if data in the FLASH is
> supposed to be there or not, it could be spurious bits set in a data
> structure. Everything I've seen so far has been either spurious data (the
> odd local IPs, the S0 port acting weird) or a HW problem on the FLASH. The
> former is recoverable with a wipe and reconfigure, the later is an RMA.
If the mapping has changed to such a serious degree, why was the
install program not designed to re-init all affected structures to
stable, maybe empty, values? I would rather be told that I will
need to re-init all ports on a PM (say, with expect) than have
something lose its mind. But, I'm not in the Livingston development
loop, so my reasoning may be faulty.
-- Jeffrey Haas, Systems Administrator Msen Inc., "Michigan's best managed ISP." jmh@msen.com +/+ http://www.msen.com