[c-nsp] IOS 12.2.33 SRA in 7600

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 06:22:57PM +0700, Ibrahim wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Anybody have deployed IOS 12.2.33 SRA/1  in operation router 7600  ? Any
> major bugs ?

Mixed bag of experience here. Hit a couple of major bugs that were 
complete showstoppers early on. A lot of documented ones, some 
undocumented ones, my personal favorite was doing a clear ip bgp (hard) on 
some bgp neighbors, and having the tcp sessions drop on the remote end, 
but having the SRA side continue to see them up and live. No amount of 
clearing or shut/no shutting would make them reestablish or convince the 
SRA box that they were actually down, had to reload to clear it. But, 
couldn't manage to reproduce that later on, and SRA deployments so far 
have been otherwise relatively uneventful (being careful not to 
"unnecessarily poke" the box of course). Basically if you find that deep 
dark spot in the back of your mind called "7500 mode", aka the mode of 
thinking where you force yourself to not look at the box funny or 
otherwise taunt it to fail, it generally won't fail. :)

I'll give you another example of a really funny issue I hit yesterday... 
SRA box, trying to upgrade to SRA1 via ftp, and the image file was being 
corrupted on download. Filesize as listed in dir correct, but the md5 hash 
on the file was not, and it looked like it wasn't writing the last little 
bit of the file correctly. Further, it was being written down in such a 
way that when you did copy disk0:thenewimage disk0:anotherfile, the md5 
have on the second copy was also completely different than the original or 
the first copy, and so on. After a few hours of head scratching, 
formatting, CF replacing, etc, the problem was finally traced to FTP under 
SRA. By using tftp, or ftp running from older SXF code, the problem went 
away completely.

Summary is: SRA1 is a good step in the right direction, and if you have 
the right testicular fortitude it can be made to work quite successfully, 
but it clearly has more than a few outstanding issues left to be resolved. 
In fact, as I write this, I just got a traceback in the CLI as the result 
of doing a traceroute. Cute. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)