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I am starting to feel cheated out of my $$

This product claims to support Nortel equipment, but those claims are false. After countless hours of research and testing, we finally threw the box in the bit bucket. We are a 100% Nortel shop and were excited to purchase a product that would allow us to manage our L2 and L3 devices simultaneously. But we were extremely disappointed. On 90% of the devices, we could not get past the login script. No matter how we configured and reconfigured the device templates, it just wouldn't work. Someone posted a 5510 temp in the sharing zone which was a complete joke. There is no way to 'force' the program to enter a character after the initial 'precommand'. And that's just assuming that the program would assume a login state once it has entered into the CLI. This is extremely frustrating and I am pulling out my hair. I know the potential management capabilities of the software because I've tested it on the few 2600's and catalyst switches that we have. If I see another 'Login failed : bad password' again, I'm liable to go postal.

If anyone has had a success story with Nortel equipment(particularly 450-24t, 425-48t, 5510, 470-48t, VPN 3050 or 5000, 8600, or bps2000), please let us know how it's done. And if possible share the template.

Thanks

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Haley

Cirrus has been tested on 5510, bps 2000s, 460s, 470s, 425s, and 380s with the cli mode enabled. I am more than happy to work with you to customize the templates to work with your devices. You should receive an email soon with my contact information.

pguenther

I have Cirrus working with all of our BPS 2000 and our Passport 8600. I would love to get it working with our 450s, but I do not believe it supports menu driven interfaces yet. For the BPS devices I had to enable the CLI mode so when you telnet into the switch and hit Ctrl-Y it drops directly into the command line. To get the BPS to drop into CLI mode from the beginning log into the switch and choose command line from the menu. From there type "cmd-interface cli". The next time you log in you will drop directly into CLI (after hitting Ctrl-Y), I will post my BPS and Passport templates for you in the sharing zone.

Agreed, our BPS 2000 and Passport 8600s are working as well.

samashcam

We have a full Nortel network also. The only devices that I have a problem with are the 2526 and the 325. Waiting for a script from tech-support.

We have 8600,460,5520,5510,325,2526.

IPv6Freely

Get better switches?

</troll>

goofyzig

Thanks so much for posting this. Our Cirrus 4.0 installation (Win2003server) is behaving the exact same way when using Telnet to devices. We are a Cisco shop and this happens to random devices on every execution. We noticed the problem when we set up a report to let us know which devices did NOT have the "Login OK" on the Login Status field. The goal being to report every morning on devices that dont have TACACS configured (since Cirrus uses a TACACS account). This then includes devices with "Login failed: bad password", "Cannot login to device: bad password", etc, but a lot of them just had the "Login Status" field blank (concerning of itself).

Just like the original poster stated, it is always a new set of random devices that Cirrus fails to login to, even devices on the SAME LAN as Solarwinds! (thus eliminating connectivity issues, which has its own way of being reported anyhow). Anyway, I reported this to Solarwinds Support a week ago or so. I wont bore you with the painful thread of back and forth emails until the issue got proper recognition, but after a complete re-install of Cirrus when it was proven that the problem was randomly consistently repeatable (if such a thing exists) they created two tickets allegedly with the Developers (tickets # 1178, and 1179) to fix this issue. One ticket is for the Telnet issue, the other is for Database flickering (totally separate issue where Cirrus cycles through database connections, including a No Database one, before coming back to the database its supposed to be using).

You know, on an editorial note, I sure hope they fix this ASAP. Support lost my templates, scheduled jobs, custom reports, now I have to do this all over again for our Non-Cisco devices. The manpages/manual/admin guide is very vague about how to configure non-Cisco devices with different prompts, so this is going to take me HOURS, HOURS, HOURS of testing. I followed the instructions for a device with really weird prompts, and Cirrus just kinda hung and wouldn't see the prompts. I dont get it, and I am kinda upset that Support lost all my work. BUT, I just hope these efforts will help to get the Telnet/Login issue fixed for ALL DEVICES, at least it would have been worth it. I'll keep my fingers crossed they get the right talented developer on this issue because IMHO this is a make or break issue for the Cirrus application.

Also, for everyone's reference regarding the Failed Login problem, here are at least 4 threads I found on the same topic here in Thwack of others experiencing a similar issue:

"> à "Just checked the report from last night and while there are some of the same switch that failed yesterday there are others that were all right yesterday and have failed today."

">

"> à "If I see another 'Login failed : bad password' again, I'm liable to go postal. "

">

phenry

I am in the same boat. Having a large number of Nortel switches (granted slated for retirement, in the next 14 months), I really need to be able to manage them.

Anyone info on templates for 450 and 470 switches would be greatly appreciated.

kbenton

I ran into the same thing. You may be out of luck on the 450s, but on the 470s (and many of the other baystacks) there is a (usually) non-default option to first go to CLI mode. All the OOTB cirrus device templates expect the baystacks to be in CLI-first mode. If you don't have that option on your 470s, newer code will give you that option if you are willing to upgrade. What I found was with a lot of wrangling and some undocumented (??) template options that SW provided, I could get the template to navigate through the menu options correctly to send the config via tftp, but cirrus still could not correctly accept the config. So the bottom line is, if you only have a menu, it doesn't work.

One other thing to look for - in some of the baystack code that does have the CLI, you still can't display the config (show run), but you can tftp it back. However, the ootb template may not have the right tftp syntax for that older code. That's all fixable, so just check your session trace and compare to doing it manually. I did find that if this is the case, the config you get back is the binary one, not text.

I'm wondering if anyone has tried this with the v5 beta, or if it was meant to be addressed in v5?

chris.lapoint

Menu-driven direct transfers (show run) will be supported in v5 and will be available in the BETA3 build.

kbenton, I know you've figured this out, but for others out there.....

For most baystack Nortel devices, the method to enable the command line interface is as follows:

Login to the device
Choose command line from the menu system
type cmd-interface cli
logout
log back in

kbenton

Chris - does that mean that tftp'ing the config back from a menu interface will not work, or am I misinterpreting that? I think what most of these older baystacks that are causing so many problems have is a menu only interface with a binary config that can only be downloaded via tftp. Is that covered in v5 or is there a plan for that? I wouldn't expect out of the box device templates considering most (or all?) of the baystacks like this are EOL, but just the functionality to make it work?

Thanks!