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 and firmware. Mostly this has been pretty uneventful, save for the issues caused by us being one of the Verification offices (VO) for Nortel’s then-new Packet MSC. Nortel has dealt with issues as they arose, and the upgrade has only slipped a day or two.

PVG preparation work had been completed according to schedule during the maintenance window by our Nortel installer and a member of the Network Operations staff. The summary of the night’s activities was already sent, network traffic was starting to pick-up, the day shift was sipping the day’s first latté as the night-shift left to go home. Continue reading “Nortel MTX14 PVG Upgrade Highlights”

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.

Love a Career in Telecoms
Love a Career in Telecoms

During this procedure the following high-level steps are taken:

  • First, create a public-private key pair using puttygen.
  • Second, create a session for logging into a particular host. This session will include the IP address and can include the username and location of your private key
  • Lastly, add your public key to the host you’ll be logging into.

Each of these steps is detailed below. Continue reading “Automating Secure Shell Login using Putty”

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 company.

Regardless, it caused the Engineering department some serious headache. As the assumption had been that redundancy was built-in, a business recovery plan had not been created. A scramble was required to cobble together a work-around to reduce the impact on our customers, whose calls in the meantime were being dumped on the floor.

Continue reading “Out-source Call Center recovers from catastrophic outage”

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 your Nortel EV-DO discussions.

Attending Nortel CDMA Wireless Users Group Meeting

The second week of September in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Nortel will be hosting their users for a week-long conference of training, product demonstrations and sales. It is also expected to be a good chance for users to get together, compare notes, swap stories and have some fun. TeleTips Network will be there, blogging from the conference and calling attention to highlights and news. We’ll be showing the flag and recruiting some new members, too. If you’ll be attending drop us a note and look for us there.

Here’s a link to the Nortel CDMA Wireless Users Group Conference