FB2700 s/w upgrade

On the basis that the A&A status pages are a "maze of twister turny passages all alike" at the best of times (yes, I know, we'll sort it), I am posting here as well.

This is all about Marmaduke:-


Customers with FB2700 FireBricks should be well aware that they can update the software at any time. The newer software makes this very easy via the web interface.

There are alpha builds which are for testing changes, and we issue these on a regular basis, sometimes several a day. These are not necessarily stable, but in general if there are any problems your FireBrick will automatically revert to older software. This are not recommended for production environments.

There are beta releases which are this we have a high level of confidence in it being stable and without major flaws. If you are concerned about risk of any problems it may be worth waiting a few days before trying a beta release as we will withdraw it in the event of any major problems being found.

Finally beta releases get promoted to be a factory release after several days use by a number of customers.

By default the FB2700 will check for new s/w automatically every day, and if it sees a new factory release it will automatically update and restart.

You can turn this off in the system settings in the config, setting sw-update="false". You can also set a sw-update-profile to restrict the upgrade to specific times or days but still allow it.

FireBrick expect to release a new factory release this week. It is expected to be V0.06.001 (Marmaduke) which is currently in beta. When this happens your brick will probably update at some point in the following 24 hours.

There are no major configuration file changes, so the upgrade should cause no problems. The FB2700 will reboot with typically under 1 second down time, and if used for things like PPPoE will re-establish PPP as fast as the network will allow (typically a couple of seconds). If not using NAT then sessions in progress should re-establish.

The longer term plan is to have discussions with customers on what they would like in terms of s/w update features. This could include simply emailing when there is new software available; a clearer notice on the control web pages; perhaps flashing LEDs to indicate there is a message saying new s/w available; anything else that customers would like. Obviously, having the product up to date in the field is better for customers and support staff, but we appreciate customers have concerns over such things and want to ensure this does what people want.

Note FB6000's do not auto update by default, so our core network sysrems will not be randomly restarting