arphilyaw wrote:
We're just getting started with our Thunderbolt setup, so please bear with me as I have what are sure to be some questions that may have already been addressed at some point.
Hi, welcome to the Thunderbolt trial.
Setup of the appliance actually went pretty easily on our network. I do have some questions on device discovery and what I'm seeing on the customer topology page. Here's our basic setup - SA540 handling firewall duties, UC520 handling Cisco phones and desktops, ESW 24 port 10/100 switch and now of course the 8 port POE switch and WAP you folks provided. What I'm seeing on the topology layout doesn't exactly represent how things are connected here...but I think I can work with that with the ability to manually move the items.
Because the Thunderbolt Appliance (TBA) doesn't yet support climbing into every device type to learn the true accurate network topology, TBA tries to present what it knows to be accurate in bolder lines (information learned from supported devices such as ESW and WAP), and then it will take a guess for anything else. Eventually, in later trial drops as support is added for more router and switch types, new devices being added to a topology should be better placed. You have the right idea though, correct the placement/linkages of any devices that the TBA gets wrong and the portal will remember your corrections.
I do, however, see a lot of items with a red 'X', specifically our UC520 and the attached Cisco phones.
A current limitation in the trial, the TBA only supports a single VLAN, so devices such as the phones and UC500-CUE that exist on other VLANs aren't being properly monitored. Mainly this is because the ARP traffic is happening in a different broadcast domain than the TBA. Marketing is currently prioritizing the addition of support for multiple VLANs to Thunderbolt, so it's good to hear that this would be useful to you.
I was also surprised that the 24 port ESW switch wasn't fully detected, I had to go in and manually enter information about it.
What information did you need to enter?
The WAP is giving me a bit of a headache as well...I'm constantly being asked to provide credentials for it, and when I do they just don't seem to take hold.
Can you confirm that you've already logged into the WAP manually and that the credentials work? I'm also aware of a few issues with the WAP4410N itself that could be causing trouble for you. Make sure that you configure the uplink port on the WAP for 100Mbps ethernet, the v1 hardware for the WAP4410N (provided to trial users) has a known hardware issue that can cause it to lock up some times when configured for 1Gbps, requiring that the device be reset before it starts working again. Locking the uplink to 100Mbps seems is the workaround. Another issue, if the WAP4410N is currently on old firmware, this can cause authentication problems for the TBA. Generally speaking, the TBA can handle firmware updates for the supported devices like the WAP4410N, but with some older versions of the WAP4410N firmware the TBA can't even make the initial connection to drive an upgrade. If you update the device manually then it should shake things loose for the TBA. Not an ideal situation, and we've had to make due with the devices that were delivered as part of this trial.
I'm also now getting a couple of notifications that the device is down when my laptop is currently connected to it and it looks to be working just fine.
Looking at the logs for your location, I think you are talking about notifications that the WAP4410N is down. I'm suspecting the 1Gbps uplink hardware issue. Try changing it to 100Mbps and let's see if that stops the outages. Basically the TBA was unable to ping the WAP4410N, and the TBA tries twice 60 seconds apart with a few ICMP packets each time before coming to the determination that the device is truly down, so these notifications are likely for real events.
Thanks for your feedback, and please keep it coming!
-mike
