On Thu Jul 24, 2014 between 10:00pm-12:00 midnight, the production Infoblox grid for the campus IPAM (DNS and DHCP) service will be upgraded from its current software version (6.5.0) to the latest release from the vendor (6.10.6).
What's new:
What's fixed:
- A recently-discovered edge case bug in DHCP failover implementation is resolved.
- A global search for a fully-qualified domain name will now find a Host record with a Host Alias matching that fully-qualified domain name.
- "Static" Leases from DHCP-enabled Hosts are now visible in the Current Leases tab.
- When customizing email alert behavior, overriding only the DHCP Thresholds section or only the Email Addresses section now produces correct results.
- Partially fixed: CSV imports to add Host records will now correctly update the SOA serial numbers of the DNS zones whose data has changed; however, IPAM still does not send NOTIFY messages for the reverse-mapping zones (causing them to update within 2 hours, rather than almost immediately). Additionally, certain CSV imports to modify Host records by Overwriting a Host Address still do not increment the SOA serial numbers. The workaround for both issues remains the same.
What's different:
- If a Host record in your zone has an Alias in a zone you don't have permissions on, Grid Manager will now allow you to make certain changes to that Host record which do not affect the Alias (e.g. adding and removing IP addresses, enabling DHCP).
- Some tables now have a "gear" icon in each row which displays a shortcut menu containing quick actions for that object.
- Host records with multiple IPs now have an additional control to select which IP should be used for inheriting Extensible Attributes from parent objects. Note that we do not presently use any Inheritable Extensible Attributes in the campus deployment, so it doesn't matter which IP you select for this purpose.
- Extensible Attributes with multiple values (e.g. "Comment+") are now displayed as a collapsible tree, instead of as separate rows with the same attribute name.
How will services be affected during the upgrade window?
- During the upgrade window, IT Professionals will not be able to log in to Grid Manager (via the GUI or the API) to make DNS and DHCP configuration changes.
- Any Scheduled Tasks created in Grid Manager that have not completed before the upgrade begins will be automatically removed.
- Due to the use of DHCP Failover and the fact that the appliances upgrade sequentially, clients will in general still be able to obtain DHCP leases during the upgrade window. However, if a particular DHCP Range is very nearly full and experiencing a lot of churn (old clients leaving and new clients joining the network) during the upgrade window, it is possible that some new clients joining that range may not be able to obtain leases until both servers are back online.
- DNS query resolution is NOT impacted by this change.
- Finally, after the upgrade itself is complete, permissions within the IPAM system will be temporarily degraded (specifically, IT Pros may be unable to add or modify DHCP-enabled Host records) until our automated script finishes applying new underlying object permissions to each Network; we anticipate that this may take as long as 12 hours (i.e. until 12:00 noon) to run to completion.
If you would like to preview the new software version prior to the upgrade date, you may log into the dev grid at https://ipam-dev.illinois.edu/
Please contact hostmgr with any questions or feedback.
Important Reminder for API Users
After the upgrade date, you will need to update your installation of the Infoblox API perl modules on any client systems that you use to run Infoblox API scripts against the production grid. Note that this upgrade cannot be applied to your production environments ahead of time; see the service documentation (http://www.cites.illinois.edu/ipam/api.html) for further explanation.
We recommend that you set up a test environment prior to the upgrade date to verify that your API scripts will work as expected against the new software version. You can download the new perl modules from
https://ipam-dev.illinois.edu/api/dist/CPAN/authors/id/INFOBLOX/Infoblox-6.0100060240571.tar.gz
Be sure that your test scripts specify (master => "ipam-dev.illinois.edu") when creating a Session.