In troubleshooting a packet size problem with some of my HP ProCurve 2520-24G (J9299A) switches, I uncovered a bug in the HP firmware. It's on an HP forum for another switch model...but I can assure you the bug is in this model as well. (1810 Bug report)
The symptoms of the problem are that when pinging from one device to another with a large ICMP frame, the packet drops without any logs or notifications of any kind...the other device looks like it's down. The command from a windows client looks like this:
WORKS: ping 192.168.10.10 -l 504The solution posted on the forum for the 1810 essential says to reset the device and start from scratch:
FAILS: ping 192.168.10.10 -l 505
"I encountered the exact same problem on two brand new 1810G's. The fact that I had configured them identically provided the clue - I had done a firmware upgrade to P2.2 (via the intermediate firmware, whatever what was) before doing anything else to both of the switches. There must have been some sort of anomaly that got propagated with the original internal configuration. Once I did a factory reset and reconfigured the switches again, the problem went away. BTW, running them Jumbo and tagged VLANs, no problems."I'm in the process of doing that now, but first I thought I would take advantage of this opportunity to upgrade the firmware as well.Current firmware version is J.14.01 (07/27/09) and I want to go to J.15.09_0021 (10/16/2013).
The steps are essentially:
1. Install a TFTP server on your network (I use Whatup's)After the firmware installed, I set the Secondary flash to be the boot flash with the follow command:
2. Log in to the console of your switch (I use putty)
3. Run the following command to download and install the firmware to the secondary flash chip
copy tftp flash 192.168.10.3 J_15_09_0021.swi sec note: syntax is: copy tftp flash <IP address of TFTP server> <case-sensitive firmware filename> <pri | sec>
boot system flash sec
NOTE FROM HP: "If neither flash is specified in the command, then the primary flash will be updated by default. Should the administrator choose to update secondary flash, first, then he or she may reboot the switch to secondary flash to ensure the stability of the new image. That command is: boot system flash sec . The system must be manually rebooted for the new firmware to take effect."The command reboots the switch...so I don't know what it means to "manually reboot" the switch. RESULT: And...now I'm locked out of the switch since the password changed!!!
To get around the password issue, I simply had to "clear" the password with a paperclip. The button is on the lower left-hand side of the switch. After pressing this button for a few seconds, I attempted to log in again and all passwords were blank (Note: Nothing else in the switch configuration changed though. The VLANs, configuration, etc. were all intact)
After setting my password again...I did some initial testing and the MTU problem appears to not have been resolved. Time will tell if it's any more stable now. In the meantime, I'm planning to decommission these from production.
To finalize the installation, copy the firmware from one flash to the other, use this command within the console:
copy flash flash priSource(s): HP
