(ASCEND) Odd behavior after Flash

["Eli Caul" <isaac@mirafiori.com>]

Here is a strange one.  I was working on a P130 today, and it was running
the 'firmware of our Forefathers', 4.6B.

As per the Ascend Rel notes, I did a sequential firmware upgrade to 4.6ci**,
NVRAMCLEAR in between, and finally up to 5.0A.

Once I was up to 5.0a, I noticed something significant:  The Router was no
longer responding on the Ethernet port!   I had upgraded the firmware via
the Serial port, painfully waiting through Xmodem at 9600 baud, and
everything went by the book.

I had the Router configured at the correct Ethernet port address and
netmask, and while it was clearly 'seeing' packets on the wire (I could see
the packet counter increment as other hosts sent traffic), it was not able
to ping the other hosts, nor were they able to ping the router.

In desperation, I plugged a Transceiver into the AUI port, and suddenly we
had Ethernet Happiness.  Everything worked great!

I'd call this a hardware issue, but this is the second Ascend that I have
flashed and seen 10bt Death on.  Either I have the Midas touch, or some
subtle change happens when I blast the configs and upgrade Firmware.  I'm
out of transceivers now, having resurrected two 'dead' Pipelines with them,
and I have to assume that I'm doing something horribly wrong.

To be painfully clear:  When in failure mode (constant), the 10bt port on
the Ascend shows a link-light at the Hub, and I have no question as to
whether it's physically connected to the network.  I replaced the Patch
Cable just to be thorough, to no effect.  I KNOW that the Ascend is on this
net, because it sees all the traffic that goes on about it.  However, I am
unable to get the Ascend to own up to it's own IP, and I've triple checked
that information.  I also made sure that no Spooky NAT or DHCP proxy stuff
was turned on.

The Ascend is happy as a Clam when linked via AUI/Transceiver, and dead to
the world when directly connected.

I spent 6 hours today on this issue, and I'm thankful that I have a bunch of
AUI transceivers hanging around from my Sun installs. For the life of me, I
can't figure out why the Media type is important on a machine that sees both
interfaces fine, and needs no configuration changes to 'see' the Net on AUI
vs. its failure mode on 10bt.
Even worse, I'm two for two on killing Routers, and yet another of my
Transceivers is hanging on the P50 I killed last week, with the exact same
failure mode after Flash.

Any thoughts?

-- Eli Caul

______________________________________________________________________
Caul                                          The Fiat Page
417 South E Street                            http://www.mirafiori.com
Santa Rosa, CA 95401                          isaac@mirafiori.com

                 'Always have at least one Fiat!'


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