Discussion on:

Cisco administration 101: Upgrading routers and switches

How often do you upgrade your routers? How hard do you try to stay current?

when upgraing the router/switch, users will loose connectivity for a short time.

I check for updates weekly and upgrade during the monthly scheduled patch cycle, 2nd wednesday every month, the server admins patch the MS Servers and I upgrade the switchs/routers.

this minimizes user down time, doing it when the servers are also unavailable.

Thank you for taking the time to post.

I find it interesting how you have scheduled maintenance windows like an ISP or carrier would. My company is a medium size network but without huge network requirements. We are a retail company so the demands for the network are only during store hours. After that, we can do all the upgrades we want (as long as the system is working first thing in the morning when the store opens).

Thanks for taking time to post,
David

Out of some bad experiences, upgrading things in
parallel can be harmful. Although you spare
down-times, it gets really hard to tell apart
which of the tasks is to blame in case the whole
system doesn't come up cleanly after it. This is
of course site and task dependent but as a rule
of thumb, I try to avoid parallel updates as long
as I'm not extremely tight on time.

This has bitten me in the past as well. Troubleshooting can be a bear, because it is much harder to narrow down the culprit of a problem.

We use FTP instead of the more unsecure and unreliable tftp, fast but more error prone. FTP on cisco routers it is slower but it gets there error free.

We prefer ftp as it does not leave us exposed to hacks as a tftp server would. Army hates that.

Here is the router steps to get ftp to work:
config t
ip ftp username johndoe
ip ftp password thisonetwo
! passive mode depends on the ftp server used
no ip ftp passive
! interface depends on security of ftp server
ip ftp source f0/0
end

The rest of the process is the same as the tftp process.

We have a script that uploads and erases memory on our cisco gear after hours (saves bandwidth). The next night we run a script that does a reset of each device from outside edge to center of network.

We upload and test new IOS on spare/offline routers then test on local production computer room routes before deploying to field offices. Simpler to fix what you can kick than soemthing you can not even see!

I agree, FTP is a much more reliable and more secure solution than TFTP. Perhaps I will write a newsletter on this.

You make a very good point and thanks for taking time to even provide the config.

Thanks for reading TechRepublic!
David

A few other methods - Http/Https are nice as well and support a lot of simoultaneous downloads.

I'm trying to put together a concise list of router and switch commands---top 5 - 10 to per from the following:

1. configuration the command and the function
2. Troubleshooting...the command and function

how to read,interpret and use the information from a troubleshooting command...

do you have a list

I was surprised that you did not make backing up the start-up configuration, and the current IOS to the TFTP server, part of the upgrade. I have always benefited by making sure I have a fix any problem when stuff goes wrong.

here is the new location for the download: http://tftpd32.jounin.net/, the author mentions that wanadoo complained about bandwidth usage.

What is a Feature License and how does it interact with the IOS?

This seems like a new marketing model, not an IOS issue?