Over the weekend I went to help someone out who was installing a brand new HP 5400R class switch. Thought it was going to be real quick and easy as I've quite a bit of experience configuring Procurve gear. I like their configuration syntax for the most part. Better than Nortel's anyway...
So we configure 2 VLANS, assign an IP address to both virtual interfaces. Clients brought up on both VLANS. Clients are able to ping other hosts in same VLAN, and the virtual interfaces (both) defined within the switch. They can not ping hosts on the dissimilar VLANs though. After scratching my head and confirming about 50 times routing is turned on, looking at the very bare bones configuration, I could not for the life of me figure out why I couldn't reach out of any VLANS.
I said to the guy I was helping " Either this switch is broken, or they introduced an undocumented feature". Searches on the internet didn't turn up anything obvious when searching for "intervlan routing HP 5400"...
We opened a ticket and based on something the engineer mentioned we discovered the issue on our own(ish). The support guy himself didn't even know what it was, he suggested a few times we check our default routes.. (what default route? *sigh* good help is hard to find these days - these are directly connected networks).
HP has decided for what ever reason, to disable IPv4 forwarding by default on their switches, even if you have ip routing turned on. When you turn it on you do not get any warning message, when you assign an IPv4 address to an interface, you get no warning. There is no messages or indication (in the config, motd or any other methods) telling you IPv4 is disabled. I can not for the life of me figure out why they think it makes sense to allow you to assign an IPv4 addresses to the box and not bother to say "hey bro, i'll add that IPv4 for you but you should know IPv4 routing is disabled"....
no where in the config is there an indication IPv6 is even enabled, or that IPv4 is disabled for that matter... The command to make things work was similar to "no ipv6 routing" or similar. When you issue this command, it doesn't even end up in the config! Its latent.
HP, why must you make life hard for us? I wasted the better part of a Sunday afternoon dealing with this. ;( If you are going to make a core fundamental change on the operational behaviour of your kit, at least tell the support guys!. Telling the customers in such a way it can't be missed would be nice too.
anyway - just something to be aware of if you are deploying any of these in the future... I suspect this behaviour will be addressed in a later firmware, I hope so anyway. IPv6 is great, but you don't need to force feed us it. :) Or am I just getting too old and this makes sense now? *sigh* I still believe IPv4 is going to be the dominate addressing method used internally for another 10 years or so.
-greg
