Major problem with firmware K.14.84 on our 8 HP Switches E5412zl(J8698A)

[Handshaw]

Last year we upgraded our 8 HP Switches E5412zl(J8698A) from  firmware K.14.65 to  firmware K.14.84 (the current version at the time) and our user community experienced some drastic network problems from windows logins that took forever to application delays and missing screens, after wrestling with these sporadic problems for a few weeks, looking at the applications involved, the domain servers, the network (which was error free and seemingly unutilized) we finally downgraded the 8 HP Switches E5412zl(J8698A) from  firmware K.14.84 back to  firmware K.14.65...AND ALL THE PROBLEMS DISAPPEARED.

Since then we've been hesitant to upgrade our firmware...

Unfortunately, the downgrade made it so that the gui password input no longer worked (we could still telnet in)

And we are hesitant to upgrade to K.15 (non-java) firmware because I hate to lose the pretty Device View that K.14 firmware offers (which looks real good in documentation).

We DO, however have some newer HP Switches E5406zl(J8697A) that since they came with K.15 I left them with K.15, and they have never seemed to have the problems that we had with K.14.84 and I've never seen anything in the release notes about anyone else having this issue (or it being resolved), so I imagine that it still exists in K.14.89.

So I guess I'll have to bite the non-java bullet and upgrade (slowly) our E5412zls to the K.15 firmware:-(

Anyone else run into this problem (or have a problem like this now and need to consider downgrading to fix it)?

[Handshaw]

Get this...

after the downgrade from K.14.84 back to K.14.65 I couldn't get into webview until I cleared the passwords...

turns out after I set the passwords again I couldn't get in again?!#@!

Get this...

However if I sat there hitting login over and over again I managed to get in sooner or later?!#@!

There's something really messed up here.

[Pourl]

Hi thx 4 your extensive report, I won't update to 15.7.8!

[Handshaw]

K.15 is ok, it's GUI is just drastically different and the newest version has glaring display bugs:

empty slots are filled with error code

statistics don't line up properly on the main status page, and line up better/worse depending on the browser you use.  FF and Chrome ok, IE9 is completely messed up...

and then there seems to be the ongoing requirement to clear the passwords when you upgrade

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The K.14.84 problem was really serious, though, right after the update from K.14.65, some of our users were taking "forever" just to log into windows (nothing was wrong with DNS DHCP disk sharing/assignments Profiles or any of the servers involved...or the network config which hadn't changed)

and our newest software was suffering from extreme delays painting the screen or failing to paint the screen

(and after ongoing troubleshooting with the application vendor [Showcase], it wasn't the application)

Then there was another older application (Image1) that one users would sit there watching the hourglass spin until it crashed while the PC next to them worked fine (at that moment).

The network switches involved (40Gbps bandwidth straight to the core) showed only minor traffic

After a few weeks of desperate panic and frustration we decided to downgrade the firmware, just in case that had something to do with it, and ALL the problems went away and have not been seen since (over 6 months).

If I had to guess, I would think that the firmware was confusing the MAC addresses and delivering data to the PCs it had right, and losing the data that had bad/duplicate MAC addresses.  It wasn't a runaway otherwise we would have seen it and the problem seemed to be some PCs were affected while others weren't.

I can't speak for K.14.89, but would personally be scared to death to try it since there's nothing in the release notes indicating that they ever found or fixed the problem.

The K.15 series however was based on an earlier version of the K.14 series, so the bad code wasn't 'brought over' to the new series.

We are running K.15 on 4 of our 12 zl switches, and K.14.65, ROM K.12.22 and the remaining 8.

[ipacharley]

Hello -

I am new with HP ProCurve switches. Earlier on one of my procurve 5412s, about 6 ports went down and then came back up. According to the logs, it appeared that these ports went from being blocked by spanning-tree, coming online, going off-line and then coming online again. All of these ports have PCs connexted to them. Have you ever run into this? Is this a code issue? Please help.

Thanks,

Harley

I 02/27/13 08:37:46 00076 ports: port C13 is now on-line
I 02/27/13 08:38:05 00077 ports: port C13 is now off-line
I 02/27/13 08:38:07 00435 ports: port C13 is Blocked by STP
I 02/27/13 08:38:09 00076 ports: port C13 is now on-line
I 02/27/13 08:43:49 00077 ports: port A15 is now off-line
I 02/27/13 08:43:52 00435 ports: port A15 is Blocked by STP
I 02/27/13 08:43:54 00076 ports: port A15 is now on-line
I 02/27/13 08:50:20 00435 ports: port B1 is Blocked by STP
I 02/27/13 08:50:22 00076 ports: port B1 is now on-line
I 02/27/13 08:50:37 00077 ports: port B1 is now off-line
I 02/27/13 08:50:39 00435 ports: port B1 is Blocked by STP
I 02/27/13 08:50:41 00076 ports: port B1 is now on-line
I 02/27/13 09:00:17 00435 ports: port E10 is Blocked by STP
I 02/27/13 09:00:19 00076 ports: port E10 is now on-line
I 02/27/13 09:00:30 00077 ports: port E10 is now off-line
I 02/27/13 09:00:36 00435 ports: port E10 is Blocked by STP
I 02/27/13 09:00:39 00076 ports: port E10 is now on-line

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@Handshaw wrote:

Last year we upgraded our 8 HP Switches E5412zl(J8698A) from  firmware K.14.65 to  firmware K.14.84 (the current version at the time) and our user community experienced some drastic network problems from windows logins that took forever to application delays and missing screens, after wrestling with these sporadic problems for a few weeks, looking at the applications involved, the domain servers, the network (which was error free and seemingly unutilized) we finally downgraded the 8 HP Switches E5412zl(J8698A) from  firmware K.14.84 back to  firmware K.14.65...AND ALL THE PROBLEMS DISAPPEARED.

Since then we've been hesitant to upgrade our firmware...

Unfortunately, the downgrade made it so that the gui password input no longer worked (we could still telnet in)

And we are hesitant to upgrade to K.15 (non-java) firmware because I hate to lose the pretty Device View that K.14 firmware offers (which looks real good in documentation).

We DO, however have some newer HP Switches E5406zl(J8697A) that since they came with K.15 I left them with K.15, and they have never seemed to have the problems that we had with K.14.84 and I've never seen anything in the release notes about anyone else having this issue (or it being resolved), so I imagine that it still exists in K.14.89.

So I guess I'll have to bite the non-java bullet and upgrade (slowly) our E5412zls to the K.15 firmware:-(

Anyone else run into this problem (or have a problem like this now and need to consider downgrading to fix it)?

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