So when I said page 300, I meant page 301. The new guide is finally out, 112 git commits later. There's too many changes for me to list them all but I'll list the big ones. The big "surprise" is licensing information for the EoL icx6xxx series is now public, and integrated into the guide. Changes I can think of offhand:
- Changed color theme to orange for halloween (most important & most arduous change)
- The big one: Integrated licensing/unlock information for all models into the guide, so it's no longer necessary to contact me. I've generated a "master set" of licenses for all models, tied to a custom serial and license ID of my choosing, so it will be incredibly easy to see if these pop up on ebay etc. There's a bit of an easter egg in the serial, see if you can find it after updating your chassis and then viewing your licenses
- The other big one: Came up with a set of instructions to get ICX7xxx series models onto the latest 8095 UFI images. This one took some poking around on some lab switches, but I believe I found the cleanest method that doesn't require a massive list of "if" statements. The 8090 train can be flashed from *any* version bootloader, older or newer. The 8090 train is also capable of flashing the new UFI image types. So, the guide has you drop into the bootloader of your new switch, and flash 8090m. Then do a quick boot into 8090m, and flash the 8095d UFI image
- If your switch happens to already be on an 8090+ version, this could be seen as an extra step, but it's the only method that will work *regardless* of the state your switch comes in. If it comes with 8040, 8050, 8060, 8070, 8080, 8090, 8092, 8095, no OS, all these combinations can follow the same guide page without traversing down a list of "if this version, then go here and do this" options. The other big advantage here is once you flash the 8095 UFI image, it automatically handles updating the bootloader and PoE firmware to the latest on first boot, so it's not necessary to have the user touch these at all, so the overall update guide for ICX7xxx is now shorter. If you already have a switch updated and configured using the old guide (so probably version 8080), you can just follow the new guide starting from the "Load The Latest UFI Image" section, as the 8080 image you're on supports UFI firmware upgrades.
- So, as mentioned above, the ICX7xxx guides have been updated to the latest stable codetrain Ruckus now recommends, which is 8095d
- ICX6xxx guides have been updated to the latest release for these, 8030u
- The other other big one: Split all the switch guides into two parts: the model-specific firmware update stuff, and then a separate page for further configuration, setup etc. That stuff is all common to the entire switch line, so this allowed me to aggregate all that into a single "further configuration" page. So, each switch guide page has the basic wipe/update/give it an IP instructions. Then you switch to a common "ICX6xxx Config" page for ssh etc setup. There's a common ICX7xxx config page for that series as well. Two different common setup pages were required as there's quite a lot of differences between the 8030 and 8095 firmware. For example, the 8095 firmware has a mandatory default login, has smartzone crap enabled by default that you want to disable usually, etc. Having common pages for config stuff makes it much easier for me to:
- Add a lot of info and config options. HTTPS webserver setup, PoE configuration and monitoring, LACP setup, helpful commands, optics info, etc. I will be adding more to these sections in the following week (VLANs, interVLAN routing, stacking, etc)
- Migrated all switch upgrade methods to occur in the bootloader. Most were already like this (and of course now the ICX7xxx series is, as described above). However a couple ICX6xxx models still had you boot whatever mystery OS your switch came with and update from there. This led to a lot of "if" statements to handle weird situations like your switch coming with layer 2 firmware, in a stack configuration, etc. None of this is necessary and has been cleaned up now that the guide has you just drop into the bootloader, wipe everything, and flash a known latest L3 image
- Removed the split "if access protection is required / if access protection is not required" option sections for the icx6xxx guides. In the newer ICX7xxx images it's no longer optional, as it comes by default secured with the super user. This means the ICX7xxx config guide does not have the choice of "if no access protection is required", and I wanted the icx6xxx config guide to match, as there's really no reason to not have a basic user/password set
- Integrated all firmware packages, license files, etc into a single zip download - same single download regardless of what series switch you have. This means when new firmware is pushed I just have one zip to update. this also allowed me to do the following:
- Add a "Brocade Overview" landing page, with the main firmware/licensing zip download. This is the new "starting point" regardless of what model you have. On this page, I've added decently detailed info/instructions on setting up a TFTP server on both windows and *nix. Having this in a single starting page allowed me to remove all the extraneous tftp instructions/notes from every single switch guide page
- Added a ready to go portable copy of Tftpd64 to the main firmware zip, it's even set to the correct directory. Windows users can just launch this and have a TFTP server properly configured and running (assuming your windows firewall doesn't interfere)
- Split the old combo icx6430/icx6450 config page into two distinct pages for each switch - the icx6430 cannot run the layer3 image, so the combo guide with layer3 instructions for the icx6450 was not very easy to follow (impossible, really)
- Reorganized the left-hand menu to make more sense, and group common stuff
- Add note to ICX6xxx config page about them not supporting 4096 bit SSH key pairs, which caused some issues with users in here before
- Moved the ICX6610 stack ports page into its own section in the fcx/6610 update/config page
- Add all the up to now private reverse engineering info I had on my old private site most of you had. It's all under the "brocade fun" section
- Went through and updated all URLs, file links, etc, to relative paths to a folder within the docs folder. This allowed me to:
- Add an archive download of the entire guide site with all files, zips, etc, so if something happens, you can use the site and all downloads entirely offline. you'll find it under the "Home" menu
There's ~100 other small changes that I don't recall offhand or aren't worth listing out, but I think the guide is pretty clean now, covers more use cases, leaves less room for error, and answers more common questions that we repeatedly answer in here. Some stats from the past 3 years of this thread for fun:
- 780,000 thread views (most viewed thread on STH)
- 6,000 thread replies (most replied thread on STH)
- 1,392 private messages to my STH inbox (license requests, questions that should have been asked in the thread)
- 1,102 emails to my email inbox (license requests, questions that should have been asked in the thread)
- 282 commits to the documentation github repo
- 5 contributors to the github repo other than me (thank you guys!)
- 900 billion million switches bought by all of you nerds
Please let me know if you find any typos etc in the new guide, it was thousands of new lines so I'm sure I missed just one somewhere. I'm now hopping on the midnight train out of beeftown and I think I can consider my duty done. this whole time I was the brocade CEO and you've all pumped up my stock numbers enough, thanks!
Big thanks to
@Patrick for allowing this monster of a thread to operate "hands off" for three years, and providing a site with a mature enough user base to make it to 300 pages without a meltdown
Lastly a huge thanks to the handful of STH members in here who have stuck around in this thread and helped users over and over for hundreds of pages now. I wanted to list you all by name but then realized I'd forget someone then feel like an asshole, so: you know who you are, thank you!