Force10 MXL: Firmware Upgrade

Uploading new firmware image

MXL switches keep two firmware images – A and B. You can set either one of them to be active. Use the following command to list firmware version of all stack members and see which one is active:

 # show boot system stack-unit all

To upload firmware you will need a TFTP server. You can use TFTPD64 (also called TFTPD32), which can be downloaded from Philippe Jounin page here .

If the active firmware image is in A, upload new firmware to B. You’ll also be asked if you want to upload firmware to all switches in the stack.

# upgrade system tftp://10.0.0.1/FTOS-XL-9.5.0.0P2.bin b:

At the time of upgrade the latest version was 9.7. This version was 2 weeks old and wasn’t recommended for use in production. Version 9.6 had a major bug. As a result version 9.5SP2 was chosen for the upgrade.

Double-check that new firmware has been successfully distributed to all switches:

 # show boot system stack-unit all

Backing up startup config

Make sure you do not miss this step. If something goes wrong and switch looses its config, you’ll have to recreate all configuration from scratch. Imagine the consequences.

# copy start tftp://10.0.0.1/MXL_01.01.15.conf

Reloading the stack

Once firmware is uploaded and config is saved, reload the stack. Be mindful that it’s a disruptive procedure and all links connected to the stack will go down. A reboot shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes, but make sure you do that after hours.

# conf t
# boot system stack-unit all primary system b:
# exit
# copy run start
# reload

Confirm that the active firmware image is now B. And that concludes the switch stack upgrade.

 

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NetApp SSH Connection Times Out

There is one tricky thing about SSH connections to NetApp filers. If you use PuTTY or PuTTY Connection Manager and you experience frequent timeouts from ssh sessions, you might need to fiddle around with PuTTY configuration options. It seems that there is some issue with how Data ONTAP implements SSH key exchanges, which results in frequent annoying disconnections.

In order to fix that, on PuTTY Configuration screen go to Connection -> SSH -> Bugs and change “Handles SSH2 key re-exchange badly” to ‘On’. That should fix it.