On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 01:17:58PM -0800, Brent Van Dussen wrote:
> Any Foundry product including serverirons should be discussed on this
> list. I am a user of serverirons, but I haven't seen any discussions
> relating to them yet..perhaps I'm the only one on the list so far that uses
> them??
>
> Shoot out some questions, maybe then we can help.
OK, here's number one: I'm curious to see what people have found with
stability of the different firmware versions.
We're running a couple of the original ServerIrons (we just got a
ServerIron XL for eval, which we're probably going to buy) and were
running for a long time with a very old firmware version - I think it
was 5.0.13 or something like that. The key thing is, it just ran and
ran and ran without problems; I think one of them might have had uptime
close to a year, and its downtime was from physically moving our NOC.
This fall, under pressure from Foundry to solve some minor feature
problems, we upgraded to what they were recommending at that time,
7.1.06, and had immediate serious problems with it. This turned out to
be this "output" bug, where problems would build up from doing commands
like "show run" or "show serv virt" and after some days it would either
crash or need to be rebooted to restore normal operation. (It took a
fair while for Foundry support to figure out what this was and tell us,
too.) I also found out from a mailing list that there's a remote DOS
against any Foundry box which supports telnet, not fixed in the
ServerIrons until 7.1.10. Foundry support recommended an upgrade to
7.1.12; 7.1.13 had just been released but the support guy said he
didn't know yet if it was reliable. We tried that and found it simply
wouldn't run with our configuration (which didn't look that unusual.)
With 7.1.12, none of the virtual servers would come up; fortunately
during the early a.m. maintenance session where I found this, I had
prepared by downloading some other binaries, so I hurriedly tried
7.1.08 and that worked fine with the same startup-config. Since then I
have seen 7.1.13 and 7.1.14 go hurriedly by and be replaced by 7.1.15.
This hasn't given me a lot of confidence in their recent software
quality control. Call me conservative, but I'd prefer an older less
featureful version that runs reliably to having the very latest thing
flake out on me.
Did I just have a run of bad luck, hitting two problem versions in a
row? Are others out there finding that most new releases work well for
them?
-- Clifton
-- Clifton Royston -- LavaNet Systems Architect -- cliftonr@lava.net WWJD? "JWRTFM!" - Scott Dorsey (kludge) "JWG" - Eddie Aikau
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