Within our test lab we have FMC 750 and two Sourcefire 7020 appliances. Firstly the download upgrade mechanism on the FMC always seems to be a bit hit or miss and despite there being a valid update available, it doesn't always download the latest version of upgrade available.
We were on version 6.2.3.10-59 and there is a valid upgrade to 6.3.0-84 (6.3.0-83) available for the FMC and devices, but for some reason it would not download on to the FMC. Every time we try, it would just say that their was no new software available.
Not to be deterred by this, I manually download the FMC and 7020 upgrade files and imported them on to the FMC.
I then carried out an upgrade to the FMC and both 7020 devices. The FMC upgrades successfully, as did one of the 7020, however the other 7020, although it successfully upgrades, it kept showing NFE0 errors, which just would not recover. We have seen this issue before and have successfully resolved them by re-imaging the appliance, which seems to fix the issue.
So the decision was taken to 'Restore' and re-image the troublesome 7020 device. We downloaded the Cisco_Firepower_NGIPS_Appliance-6.3.0-83-Restore.iso image and followed the step-by-step instructions as we have done previously.
After the appliance had been re-imaged and rebooted, it successfully came up on version 6.3.0-83 and the previous issues with the NFE0 errors appeared to be fixed. The only problem is that the device is now reporting itself as a Sourcefire 7010 device and not a Sourcefire 7020 device.
How can this be?
Additionally, now because the device is reporting itself as a Sourcefire 7010, we cannot assign the licence to it from the FMC as the licence we have spare on the FMC is for a Sourcefire 7020 device, which was the licence released when we deleted the 'faulty' 7020 from the FMC prior to us re-imaging the device. As there doesn't seem to be anyway of getting the device back to thinking its a 7020, my plan now is to re-image it back to Sourcefire_3D_Device_S3-6.2.0-362-Restore.iso and then carry out stepped upgrades to try and get it to version 6.3.0-83. Hopefully it will work, but why am I having to waste so much time doing this on what should be a simple upgrade?
Has anyone got any ideas why this might happen?
This is not filling us with confidence for upgrading our production platform.
Regards,
Dom.
