Bulk Firmware Upgrade Option in Systems Settings Tab

[Kim Armstead]

Has anyone tried to use the bulk firmware upgrade option in the Systems Settings tab?  I was able to get all the set up done and chose the 8 cameras that I needed to upgrade.  The job seemed to finish successfully.  However when I checked the firmware on the 8 cameras that needed the upgrade, THEY WERE NOT UPGRADED!!  Instead of upgrading the cameras selected via checkbox, the job chose the first 8 cameras on the original 2600 model list, completely ignoring the cameras that I had actually SELECTED FOR THE UPDATE!!! 

Is anyone else having trouble with this dialog?

Cisco, can you repair this ASAP!!!

Thanks.

ka

[Branden Varney]

Hi Kim,

   There was a recent post as well on this same issue. We are seeing this with some other customers as well and are working on the root cause.

   It was originally brought to our attention in 7.0 with bug ID cscuf61447but is still popping up in 7.5 in some cases.

https://tools.cisco.com/bugsearch/bug/CSCuf61447

The work around listed in the bug is:

Do not click the column headers to sort the list of cameras in the Bulk Action tool. Instead use the filters on the left side of the screen to get a smaller list of cameras and then select the cameras to update without sorting the columns. For example, filter the cameras by Media Server, Camera Model, Location or Camera template.

[Kim Armstead]

There's another problem.  When you try to use it for 4300s and 4500s, it doesn't filter out the "Not in Recommended Firmware" cameras when you check the box.  You have to end up scrolling through all of them to visually identify the ones with the wrong firmware.  Please add this to the bugfix.

Thanks.

ka

[Branden Varney]

noted, thank you

[Kim Armstead]

OK Brandon. Sorry to keep adding to this.  I've been trying to complete the firmware upgrade for our system since receiving the notice of the workaround.  It would seem the 4300 and 4500 series firmware upgrade dialog is just really off.  I can't even tell what it's doing.  No matter which cameras I select to upgrade, it just upgrades a random set of cameras.  I  can't make any sense of it.  Please add to the bugfix that this process should be completely reworked.  It's just not working at all.

Thanks.

ka

[Branden Varney]

Please upload screen shots showing.

Nick Hood that had a similar issue on this forum did a different type of workaround. He did not use the functions on the left side but rather used the columns to do some basic filtering.

Side note, are you able to open a TAC case up on this?

[Jonathan Young]

Kim,

We've experienced the same problem and it is very frustrating. We had to modify the bugfix workaround because it didn't quite work for us either. Here's what we found.

- It doesn't matter if you sort by column name or not; the utility will randomly pick a camera from the filtered list.

- If you write a filter that captures all of the cameras you need to update, and update all of them, it will update as expected.

- If cameras are failing using the utility, check to see if you can install manually. You may be getting bit by the "Bad Magic Number" bug, which requires you to set your camera name back to it's default.

We found ourselves updating all the cameras for a specific location with the same model all at once. We'd schedule a brief downtime with the department and do it all at once. Of course, we tested this in a lab environment first to make sure the firmware didn't break anything.

As for "Not In Recommended Firmware", this worked for us on 4500E cameras as long as we specified what our "Recommended" firmware was under the "Manage" firmware tab.

This was all using 7.2.0. We haven't installed any firmware updates since going to 7.2.1.