Nortel 470 - image versions required - not available on Avaya support anymore...

[bertheylen]

Hi all,

We have some Nortel 470 switches which badly need a software upgrade (some are still running 2.2 ...).
Problem is that our own software repositories aren't going back far enough in time to have all intermediate versions...
Unfortunately, the Avaya support website also only offers the 3.7 versions...

The exact versions that I would need are:
2.5 -> 3.0 -> 3.1.9 (or 3.2.x) -> 3.5.4 -> 3.6.4 -> 3.7.

I'm silently hoping that someone here who's been working with Nortel 470s since the dawn of times has kept all versions somewhere...?

Thanks a lot in advance!!

[KT]

Bert-

you can go directly to V3.7 w/o problems. I just upgraded the existing stack from v2.5 a few wks ago.

good luck!

[Dominik]

Hi bertheylen and welcome to the forum.

as KT mentioned a direct update is possible.
Depending on your configuration, maybe you get a non working config.

The safe way is to make a factory default after the update from 2.5 to 3.7.
Under some circumstances your switch can be unstable after the update.

Good Luck

[Telair]

In the past when I have had to upgrade very old switches but don't have the code to go through the Avaya approved upgrade path, I would build an exact duplicate stack and load the config from the production stack on to my duplicate.  Then I could test doing large code upgrades in safety.  But if you have support from Avaya, poke at them with a sharp stick and they should be able to send you the older code you need. 

[bertheylen]

Thanks for the quick responses and advice to all!!

I was a bit worried about not following the correct upgrade path as some of these switches are pretty business critical (don't ask why we're still using 470s with SW 2.2 as critical devices...  )

Anyway, we took our chances (made sure to have good backups of the configs, had a local TFTP ready etc) and made the jump from 2.2 to the oldest version that we were able to find, which is 3.1.9.  No issues were encountered and the config was completely preserved!  We then followed the correct upgrade path to not test our luck any further :-).

Anyway - final result : all switches are now completely upgraded!

[Michael McNamara]

Great job!

Thanks for the feedback.