Why do IPSIs go bad so often, and Y if duplicated does it cause outage

[LeFoneChique]

This is the third or fourth time an IPSI board problem has caused a major production outage for us in about a year. These boards are duplicated in the system, and yet we continue to experience outages.

Does Avaya or anyone have an explanation for this situation?

Why when my IPSI’s are duplicated, do problems seem to look past the duplicated board, and affect the entire system?

Examples:

1) New S8710 system installed for 2 months. Entire system (12 port networks/ 3K stations) would periodically BOUNCE. All phones down - all calls in progress lost. Took avaya MONTHS to figure out that the problem was multiple bad IPSIs. Replaced 10.

2) Last month. One bad IPSI took DOWN the entire division - (S8710 CM 3.1.) Took Avaya 8-9 hrs to determine it was the 1 bad IPSI. replaced the board.

3) Yesterday - took all circuits down in the port network with the bad ipsi. replaced board.

Yes, In all cases all boards are duplicated.

 

[dmthames]

Hey Jimbo,

Any info on the stability of fw36 or it's impact on wan latency issues?

Dean.

 

[langl3y]

We've been on fw36 (15 x IPSIs of varying HW versions) for 36 hours with no adverse affects so far. Activating the firmware did reset the auto-negotiate setting on the IPSIs back to enabled, however, this was expected and we changed it back to disabled. If you're upgrading, make sure you read the PCN and implementation guide.

We are seeing no socket connection issues anymore.

cheers
langl3y

 

[BHodgins]

langl3y, curious how you knew that FW36 would reset the auto-negotiate setting back to enabled? Our Avaya tech upgraded us to FW36 last night and left it with auto-negotiate, enabled, which caused our 500 seat call center to lose their phones twice today when the port network spontaneously rebooted due to duplex mismatches. Only after Avaya disabled the auto-negotiate did that problem stop. <ugh!>

 

[BHodgins]

how does one determine the username/password to use with ipsisession or ipsilogin (when using telnet to the ipsi board)?

 

[RFWatts]

Is there a PCN/PSN for firmware release 36? I'm not able to one. The release notes don't seem to indicate anything either. I tried deploying firmware 36 on some of my IPSI, and indeed it set the port negotiation back to auto. When I tried to set it back, it gave the error, "Disable auto negotiation failed". This is happening on all my firmware 36 IPSIs. As a result, I ended up with speed/duplex mismatches, and my IPSIs would occasionally alarm. I ended up putting firmware 31 back on for now. I validated my md5sum, as well as the ap/bp file version. I see where some people have had Avaya set the duplex/speed...Did they indicate how they did that? I've tried logging in remotely, and via the services port. The command I've been using is "set port negotiation 1 disable", but it seems to always fail on my f/w 35 IPSIs.

 

[MaxEMEA]

You must set the Speed, Duplex, Negotiation in that order.

1. Set port speed 1 100MB
2. Set port duplex 1 FULL
3. set port negotiation 1 disable

Actually, you may be able to swap 1 & 2 around but doing it this way has ALWAYS worked for me using FW36 on various Hardware versions.

Please let me know if this works for you.

 

[mikeydidit]

Telnetting to the IPSI.

ipsilogin
craft
serv1ces (Note I is #1)

"You don't stop playing because you get old. You get old because you stopped playing."

 

[row1030]

You can get in to the IPSI by doing "go shell" from the ASA emulator mode and telnet from there.