On Thu Jul 5 between 5:00-7:00am, the production IP Address Management appliance grid will be upgraded to a new software release from the vendor (8.2.6).
What's new:
- support for new appliances and DNS Traffic Control feature set which will be deployed later this year
- many new objects supported in WAPI v2.7
What's fixed:
- 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.
- This "Immediate Fixed Addresses" feature was previously enabled in 2016, but subsequently disabled due to instability problems which have now been fixed by the vendor.
- various behind-the-scenes fixes
What's different:
- Many DNS record types now have a "Protected" checkbox to restrict Dynamic DNS (DDNS) updates. Since University of Illinois IPAM does not currently allow any DDNS updates, it doesn't matter whether you enable this checkbox for your records.
- Grid Manager now records the creation time of stand-alone DNS records (but not Hosts) and displays this information in the GUI.
- DHCP Leases now include a "Fingerprint" which automatically identifies the likely operating system of the requesting client.
- We are renaming the extensible attribute used to filter the My Domains and My Networks Smart Folders (https://wiki.illinois.edu/wiki/x/lhwFIQ) from "CM Contact" to "CDB Permission", to more accurately reflect its meaning. Existing Smart Folders will transparently update in place.
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 Legacy Perl-only 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-8.00260060371069.tar.gz
RESTful Web API (WAPI) users do not need to take any action; previously advertised WAPI versions (1.4.2, 2.2.2) are still supported by the new software release.