Nortel MTX14 PVG Upgrade Highlights

During last night’s maintenance window our Packet-Voice Gateways (PVG) were upgraded as part of our preparation to upgrade the entire cellular switch to the latest version of software, MTX14. Preparations have been underway for several weeks, leading up to what Nortel calls the One Night Process (ONP.) The preparations include component-by-component changes to hardware, software …

Automating Secure Shell Login using Putty

Putty is an ssh client for Microsoft Windows which can automate secure logins to remote computers. This tutorial allows you to automate these logins using your personal public/private key pair. Putty can be downloaded from here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/. Download and install the entire putty distribution. During this procedure the following high-level steps are taken: First, create …

Out-source Call Center recovers from catastrophic outage

This became a surprisingly full day. An earthquake near Taiwan around 1 PM local time disrupted communications lines to our out-sourced call center in Manila, the Philippines. This was certainly a surprise to our Customer Care group as they were under the, apparently mistaken, impression that diverse redundant voice routes were provided by the out-source …

New Nortel EV-DO Message Board

TeleTips Network has just opened a new message board for the Nortel EV-DO. There seems much to learn. Nortel has provided a training course which I’ll be following over the next few weeks. I’ll post the course specifics later, and a review of the course materials. In the meantime, this board can be used for …

Site home page is now dynamic

Overnight I implemented a script that dynamically generates the home page. The purpose of this change is to give better visibility to new information and reader contributions. Off to the side you can see sections showing recent entries into our message boards, recent reader comments to our blog , most popular forum topics. There’s much …

Starent 16000 PDSN MOP – Adding IP Pools

Purpose The purpose of this Method Of Procedure (MOP) is to add ranges of IP Addresses, called “pools”, to the Starent 16000 PDSN. An IP address from an IP pool is assigned to a subscriber by the PDSN when a data session is initiated. Procedure Begin this procedure by creating a backup of the PDSN …

Starent 16000 PDSN Troubleshooting

I’ve been working for a couple months now to create the software infrastructure for allocating wireless data network resources based upon the product purchased by the subscriber. This means granting them access to the purchased resources, and denying access to other resources. This is one of the functions of the PDSN, in cooperation with the …

Starent PDSN

We continue working to deploy new Wireless Data plans. This week we’ve stumbled on an issue in the edge router. It does not appear to be properly detecting the OSPF routes. This problem manifests itself when the 4th octet of the IP address assigned by the PDSN to a handset exceeds “128”. Whenever a higher …

SPAM, Sendmail and favicon.ico

I’ve been working on site administration for the last couple of days. To reduce the volume of SPAM-bots registering on the message boards I installed a modification in early June. Unfortunately I neglected to test the modification adequately and it had the unintended consequence of stopping not only the SPAM-bots but also legitimate users. My …

Overview of E-9-1-1

I was recently asked to provide a parlor brief on Wireless E-9-1-1. Wireless E-9-1-1 allows a handset to be located. There are three phases of E-9-1-1: Phase 0 provides the call-back number only, no location information. Phase I provides the location of the cellular tower from which the 911 call was made. Phase II provides …