[AusNOG] Anyone run across any incompatibilities between Telstra's NEC DSLAM's and Cisco ADSL routers?

Wed Nov 17 10:55:43 EST 2010

Since this hasn't been mentioned thus far, EEM can also come in quite handy for accommodating for buggy type situations you simply are wedged into.

Eg; Cant/don't want to move forward due to bug X, can't/don't want to move back due to bug Y, end up finding some "middle ground" being the lesser of two evils, and try and accommodate until you either get an engineering release (shiver) or a incorporated fix, drop in some scripting in the interim to give you some degree of control over the issue.

For example, rather than burning a full time person at your helpdesk managing hard resets at client sites,   I wonder if you could have dropped in some EEM/TCL which gives the CPE a degree of autonomy to manage the condition itself, given it is the device that is isolated from the head end network.  I suspect under that circumstance, you wouldn't even need to resort to a full reset of the box if you were htting an attenuation bug? You may have got away with some IP SLA and a subsequent int atm0 shut/no shut, which will force a reset of the ATM SAR chip, and complete DSL_STOP and transition back to DSL_SHOWTIME which will force a complete re-download of the firmware to the ATM hardware before powering it back on.

Even if its a affected secondary link with no production effect, such as a backup 3G service, these types of condition/response actions can be really useful in simply having the CPE take care of the matter itself, without involving humans unless necessary, which tends to scale a lot nicer :) By the time your monitoring system of choice has identified a remote site issue, production or otherwise, you've already got an email landed at your support team from the CPE saying, hey i'm site blah, this is what happened, this is what i did, all nice and tidy, problem solved. Potentially well before the call even comes in, or potentially avoiding a future call etc etc.

If you can give the CE(or P/PE/whatever!) a basic brain per se to deal with issues on its own, that you can forsee it encountering at some point, why not? :) (particularly if it involves CE isolation!)

There's a plethora of resources and examples out there :)

Enjoy.

From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Darren Moss
Sent: Tuesday 16 November 2010 5:04 PM
To: Daniel Hooper; ausnog at ausnog.net
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Anyone run across any incompatibilities between Telstra's NEC DSLAM's and Cisco ADSL routers?

Hi Justin,

We have more than 100 Cisco 87x units out there and they all work fine with no issues. The bulk of them are on Telstra Business Broadband connections.

We *did* have an issue with the first release of Cisco 857 series routers, which was related to a firmware problem. Cisco was engaged, a firmware update was provided, and Telstra agreed to upgrade all our clients running the 857 series units to the new firmware.

This resolved an issue where the DSL service would reset due to attentuation issue in the firmware, however the router would never reconnect.

We were sometimes able to force a service reconnect by tearing down the tunnel between Telstra and the client site, however the best way to fix was to hard reset the router at each site, which was very painful and ended up consuming a full time person on our helpdesk to ring everyone and manage the restarts.

So to answer your question, on the 87x routers we have no issues, but on the 857 series units we had many issues until the firmware was upgraded.

Hope this helps.

Cheers.

Regards,

Darren Moss
General Manager
Australia and New Zealand

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From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Daniel Hooper
Sent: Tuesday, 16 November 2010 5:27 PM
To: ausnog at ausnog.net
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Anyone run across any incompatibilities between Telstra's NEC DSLAM's and Cisco ADSL routers?
Hi,

Seen something similar in Kalgoorlie WA about 5-6 years ago.

A provider had rolled out about 30-40 Cisco 8xx's, unfortunately I didn't know what DSLAM gear was in the exchanges but they quickly had us run around and deploy Dlink ADSL routers& return the cisco's.

Later down the track the provider installed its own DSLAM's so I never found out the cause of the problem.

Possibly it was just a large cock up on the providers behalf as I had plenty of other customers running on Telstra based DSLAM equipment with Cisco's at the time and the provider had not applied a firmware update to the DSL interface.

It was just really odd though that they replaced the lot with DLINK's and then rolled out their own DSLAM's.

Regards,

Daniel Hooper | Systems Administrator | Emerge Technologies | ph 08 9080 5100 | fax 08 9021 0222 | 3/72 Brookman St, Kalgoorlie WA, 6430 | dhooper at emerge.net.au<mailto:dhooper at emerge.net.au>

From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Justin Twiss
Sent: Tuesday, 16 November 2010 2:05 PM
To: ausnog at ausnog.net
Subject: [AusNOG] Anyone run across any incompatibilities between Telstra's NEC DSLAM's and Cisco ADSL routers?

Hi guys (&gals!)

Just wondering if anyone else has run across issues with ADSL reliability between Telstra's NEC DSLAM's and Cisco ADSL routers?

Got a client down in Henderson WA who's having all sorts of reliability issues and Telstra have come back and advised that the Cisco ADSL router (877) is conflicting with the NEC gear in the Exchange...

Personally, just sounds like Telstra's trying to fob off the customer to me (given, if someone asked me for a reliable rock-solid ADSL router, I'd point them to the 877 (or above)) but just thought I'd double check before going to the hassle of configuring a non-cisco device for the site...

Off-list responses are probably better and I'll summarise to the list if it's suitable to do so...

-JT

Justin Twiss
Hosting Manager
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Bekkers, 884 Beaufort Street, Inglewood, WA, 6052
Telephone: +618 9422 6777
Mobile:  0405 555 044
Facsimile: +618 9272 6625
Justin.Twiss at bekkers.com.au<mailto:Justin.Twiss at bekkers.com.au> | www.bekkers.com.au<http://www.bekkers.com.au>

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