Feature Requests

[david.sovereen@mercury.net]

In troubleshooting certain issues with our Netonix switches, the lack of certain stats and logs has made tasks impossible or very difficult. Some of these things, we've feature-requested before, others are new.

1. Please show STP path cost to root in the web and ssh interfaces. Right now, we can only see which port is the path to root, but we cannot see the calculated path cost of root or alternate paths. Makes it difficult when we think one port should be the path to root, but another is showing root. We cannot see the calculated root path cost to know what the Netonix is thinking.

2. Log entries show when a port changes between discarding, learning, and forwarding. When ports change to root and alternate, logging and also giving the new path cost on path cost changes would be helpful in performing post mortem of network events.

3. Log when time is obtained from the NTP server. When a Netonix boots up, you end up with a bunch of December 31 entries, and then a Dec 31 18:00:37 system: starting ntpclient, but not an entry that tells you the current time. One cannot know if it has been hours or weeks between the time that switch obtained time and the next log entry, making it impossible to know when the switch booted up (or rebooted on its own). Making an entry immediate after the ntpclient starts and obtains time will allow us to know when the switch last booted.

4. Power startup delay. It would be most helpful to have the switch boot up ports in a particular order. For us, we'd like to boot up the primary backhaul first, wait 60 seconds, then the secondary backhaul, then the local router, wait another 60 seconds, then the APs, etc. This would keep APs from powering up and trying to do RADIUS authentication before the backhauls are up, causing SMs to fail registration and back off to where they will only attempt registration with greater and greater delay between attempts. Among other things, we could ensure RADIUS servers would be available the moment the APs go online.

5. On SFP ports, we never seem to get link down log entries. Only link up log entries, like this:

Dec 31 18:22:14 Port: link state changed to 'up' (1G) on port 13
Dec 31 18:22:14 Port: link state changed to 'up' (1G) on port 13
Dec 31 18:22:22 Port: link state changed to 'up' (1G) on port 14
Dec 31 18:22:22 Port: link state changed to 'up' (1G) on port 14

Thank you for your consideration,

Dave