I just finished upgrading our code. It went without a hitch... well we had to restart an aborted upgrade on one of the DSP cards. Didn't have a problem upgrading the ARC from 4.2.32 to 5.0.9 (we have a 128M DRAM - 16M flash ARC). As for performance? Had some glitches with customers trying to login but it may have been a radius problem. Yet, most users are getting v.90 connect :-)... So far, I think its safe to upgrade. Currently the DSP cards are on CT1s (planning to change to PRI in the next week). Will post some more info later. Mike Andrews wrote:
On Thu, 1 Jun 2000, Jeff Mcadams wrote:
Ooh...another FYI that at least Mike and I ran across. The new NMC code is completely different...pretty much rewritten from scratch is what I understand. This is good and bad. The good is that its written to not [munch] apparently stand some chance of getting that fixed now). The bad is that they have changed the way they do retrieval of SNMP values apparently. The older code apparently "cached" (maybe pre-fetched? don't know details) values from the cards across the management bus. This new code doesn't do that...meaning snmpwalks are going to be a tad bit slower overall. For values that it doesn't have to grab across the management bus, its *much* faster (values about the NMC itself, and index values basically), but when it has to get data over the management bus, it does bog down a bit more. Supposedly the HiPer NMCs are much better about this, but with the 486 based cards, this can get to be a fairly big problem if you're throwing a lot of SNMP traffic at it.
This brings up something I meant to mention in the beta... but was holding out hoping they'd actually come up with a speed improvement or reimplement the cache or something.
When it became obvious that the NETserver was running out of gas, 3Com did a trade-in program for people to trade their NETservers in for HiPer ARCs.
Would they consider doing the same for 486 NMC's to P5 NMC's?
The only difficult part about an NMC tradein program would be x2 feature enable keys for Quads. (We still have two NMC's that manage Quads.) Of course they could just say the hell with it and permanently enable it on P5 NMC's so you don't need one, but, well, we've been through that discussion here before...
Given the costs of manufacturing a P5 NMC are probably far lower than a HiPer ARC, I would think this would be even easier for them to stomach than the NETserver->ARC tradein...
The performance difference is going to be an issue for us because we almost continuously hammer on the NMC pulling connect stats off of it, and with more than about 5 PRI's in a box it *really* starts to get sluggish. On a box with only a couple of PRI's, it's not a problem, in fact it's usually faster than the old code. But load a box up with 9 PRI's and watch all your software griiiiind to a halt... I suppose we could reimplement a cache of our own using, say, a SQL database, but I don't have time this month... been busy rolling out ADSL, installing a new core router (mmmmm, 7206vxr) and upgrading our email system (read: finding/patching bugs in procmail) and really haven't touched anything 3Com related for a while.
Anyway, despite the NMC being a bit slower, we've been running what is now TCS 4.0 on one production box for a few weeks now and I don't think we've had a Rockwell related complaint since. On the other hand, I'm a bit more removed from tech support than I used to be, so maybe it's just that nobody's telling me. :)
Mike Andrews (MA12) * mandrews@dcr.net * http://www.bit0.com/ VP, sysadmin, & network guy, Digital Crescent Inc, Frankfort KY Internet services for Frankfort, Lawrenceburg, Owenton, Shelbyville www.fark.com: If it's not news, it's Fark. (Or something like that.)
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