ERS 8600 - Upgrade from SW:4.1.7.1 to SW:5.1.0

[Miro H]

Hi,

I am fairly new to Nortel equipment I am doing the upgrade on pair of IST Core peer switches with SMLT configured and in HA mode. I read the manual several times, took special care in what was written about this kind of upgrade, test it and hope that there would be no problems. I am doing it with a console connection.

Does anyone has experience on some special things to look for, which are not written in the manual?
Any problems, bugs, etc.?

I read some things which are not clear to me also. It says in the manual:

"Older load, boot, and configuration files may be required if the upgrade is unsuccessful. Make sure you backup these files to a safe place before you remove them.
Consult Nortel Support for recommendations about deleting old image (.img), log(.txt), PCAP(.cap), or bootconfig (.cfg) files."

Why is that? I can't just remove these old files to create more space for new files?


Also:

"Hidden files
- ospf_md5key.txt
- shadov.txt
- snmp_usm.txt
- snmp_comm.txt
- passvord.txt"

It seems that I don't have "passvord.txt" hidden file. For what is that?
I realized hidden files can only be copied from flash to pcmcia and vice versa. You can't copy them via FTP regardless of setting attributes. Is this true?

I'll be free to ask some more questions regarding this as they come along. Want to understand all the things that are not clear to me.

Thanks.

[John T]

The best thing you can do is to review the release notes of all the interim software releases.

The manual is just advising you to clean the PCMCIA and FLASH filesystems if you have a lot of garbage around. You obviously need enough space to copy up the new software release and you want some additional room for logs and such.

You can leave those "special" files alone. Just delete any large .log files and remove any no longer used software releases.

[qazzie]

Hmmm don't take it to offence.

But if I where you, let the box alone and let somebody do it who has experience with this. This ain't consumer electronics.

Those hidden files are on the underlying OS filesystem, they are just not visible in the target shell of vxworks (the target shell is the CLI as you and I know it). They are made hidden with attrib, not more fancy than that.
If you issue the cmd "save boot" they are copied to both switch fabrics filesystems.

But for the upgrade there is no need to worry about those files.

Before you upgrade you could perform a save boot and save config and after that "cp /flash/boot.cfg /pcmcia/boot4171.cfg" and also for the config.cfg file so you have those saved in case you need to roll back to the 4.1 code. On the way forward you upgrade with the existing (but modified to look for the new image) boot.cfg and config.cfg and perform to boot the p80b5xxxx.img file.

q