On Thu Mar 24 between 5:00-7:00am, the production IP Address Management appliance grid will be upgraded to a new software release from the vendor (7.2.7).
What's new:
- Basic Search can quickly locate objects matching a specific IP address, MAC address, or DNS Name. The previous Global Search functionality is now called Advanced Search, and now supports saving your search as a Quick Filter.
- CSV Import has a much improved user interface, and can also now be used to Delete existing objects.
- DHCP-enabled Host and Fixed Address adds/changes/deletes now take effect immediately (without waiting 5 minutes for a restart), provided that the address does not fall within a Range.
- update: this feature now appears to cause instability, and so per the vendor's recommendation it has been disabled (as of 2016-08-15) until it can be fixed in a future software release.
- DHCP Logic Filters can now be applied to an entire Network instead of just a Range (meaning that they will also apply to Hosts and Fixed Addresses within that Network), giving us additional implementation flexibility for complex use cases.
What's fixed:
- CSV Import now correctly increments SOA serial numbers and generates NOTIFY messages, ensuring that DNS changes will propagate rapidly from IPAM to the main nameservers dns1.illinois.edu, dns2.illinois.edu, and dns3.illinois.edu (previously, there were some cases in which this did not occur).
What's different:
- The Logout button in the upper-right corner is replaced by a drop-down menu labeled with your username, containing Profile (which no longer appears in the Toolbar) and Logout.
- Grid Manager will no longer display a blue bar at the top of the screen with the message "Restart services to apply the change", even if you have made a change which requires waiting 5 minutes for a restart.
- The user interface controls to schedule (for some time in the future) the addition of a new object now look different from the controls to schedule a change to an existing object.
- IPAM View now has "Toggle flat view" / "Toggle hierarchical view" for Networks and Network Containers.
- The IPAM Utilization bar displayed for each Network and Network Container is now (usually) colored red for values over 95%.
- "Gear" icons with shortcut menus now appear in DNS and DHCP View tables as well as IPAM View.
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.
If you would like to preview the new software release, you may log into the development IPAM grid at https://dev.ipam.illinois.edu/
Please contact hostmgr with any questions or feedback.
Important Reminder for Perl API (PAPI) Users
After the upgrade, you will need to update your installation of the Infoblox PAPI perl modules on any client systems from which you run PAPI scripts. Do not apply this change to a production environment ahead of time, as the modules are not backward-compatible.
If you have a test environment, you can run your PAPI scripts against the development grid (specify master => "dev.ipam.illinois.edu" when creating a Session) to verify ahead of time that they will work as expected with the new software release. The new perl modules are available at https://dev.ipam.illinois.edu/api/dist/CPAN/authors/id/INFOBLOX/Infoblox-7.0026007031883.tar.gz
RESTful Web API (WAPI) users do not need to take any action; the previous WAPI version (1.4.2) will still be supported by the new software release.