Thu Nov 1 02:11:19 PST 2001 — We’ve completed the firmware upgrade on the Extreme Networks. The upgrade actually required two reboots which took about three minutes each.
After the upgrade, our 200Mbps FD Etherchannel connections to the Alteon load balancing switch which serves our mail and web servers seems to have failed. We’ve backed up to a set of 100Mbps links, and the servers are available.
We’re going to take this opportunity to upgrade the internal backbone link between the primary Alteon and the core switch to gigabit Ethernet, which will address our issues with Etherchannel between the Black Diamond and the Alteon. Once we’ve got that working, we’ll be bringing online “hot”, a new Extreme Networks Summit switch. Once connected, we’ll move the servers from ape (the Black Diamond) over to hot. The move to Gig-E and deployment of hot should include only momentary interruption of web hosting services.
This architectural change allows us to resolve some issues in the Extreme and Alteon environment where the Alteon was acting as a load balancing switch between two vlans in ape. This type of back and forth of traffic was causing some confusion in the switches, and caused some headaches.
-Kelsey and Dane