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How to: Migrate from 1.x (EOL) environment

Introduction

This page is for ByteBlower servers migrating from 1.x to 2.x. If you have questions, or which to reinstall your 2.x ByteBlower servers do contact us directly at support.byteblower@excentis.com . We'll get your system up-and-running!

This article concerns the 1x00, 2x00, 3x00 or 4x00 ByteBlower series. It's not relevant for the 5100 series.

Migrating from the ByteBlower server 1.x environment to the newly released 2.x environment requires a full reinstallation. This guide will guide you through this process.

Once your 2.x server environment is installed, you can update your server software automatically over the network and switch between installed versions. Even running the legacy 1.10 server is possible from the 2.x server environment!

Please disconnect all network connections except the management interface during the installation process.

If you run into any problems, don't hesitate to contact us through this support portal. Furthermore, we can always ship an installation stick to your premises, if creating the bootable medium is not possible.

1. Download installer

To install the 2.x ByteBlower server environment, you need server installer image (an ISO file), which can be download from this support portal.

2. Create bootable installer medium

Now that you've downloaded the ISO-file it must be "burned" to a CD or USB-key. We will use this CD or USB-key to boot the server and install ByteBlower-2.x.

Depending on your OS on your personal computer you can use the following methods to create a "bootable" USB/CD

a. Windows

USB stick

You can burn an ISO to a USB stick using the rawrite32 tool.

CD-ROM

A free tool called CDBurnerXP is available. A how to to burn an ISO file to a disk is available.

b. Linux

USB stick

For the following shell example, we assume:

the USB stick is found as /dev/sdd
the path to the downloaded image is /path/to/byteblower-installer.iso
you have root rights or have access to sudo.

$ sudo dd if=/path/to/byteblower-installer.iso of=/dev/sdd
$ sync

CD-ROM

Any CD creating software will do. You can use Brasero for example.

Select "Burn image"
Select the image to burn.
Select the destination CDROM/DVD

3. Configure BIOS to boot from installer medium

Before the ByteBlower software can be installed, the server must be configured to boot from the USB.

1100 and 1200 series servers

For 1100 and 1200 series servers, the boot order must be changed in the BIOS. This is explained in the following guides:

After the installation, the boot order must be changed back to the original order, so the (newly installed) server boots from its hard disk again.

1300, 2100, 2200, 3100 and 4100 series servers

On 1300, 2100, 2200, 3100 and 4100 series servers, you can select the device to boot from in the Boot menu. This is opened by rebooting the server and pressing F11 during startup.

From the boot menu, select your USB stick. There may be multipe USB devices in the boot menu, including the internal USB security dongle. The security dongle will have one of the following words in its name: SecuTech, Smartkey, SmartPico, Unikey, EuSec or Eutron. Make sure you do not select this USB device.

If your USB stick is not recognized as boot device, make sure that "Legacy USB Support" is set to enabled:

Using the boot menu, your system will boot from the selected device only once. Therefore, the boot order in the BIOS must not be changed.

4. Installing the ByteBlower software

Please make sure all network connections except the management interface are disconnected at this point!

Boot the ByteBlower Server from the bootable install stick. When the Install Environment has finished booting, a login prompt will appear.
The login credentials are username "root" and password "excentis".
When access is granted, start the installation with the following command:
$ byteblower-installer
Now the install environment is running, you will be asked a couple of questions.
It will ask if the correct ByteBlower Server series is found for the current hardware. Select No if the auto-detect was wrong.
If you selected No in the previous step, you will see a selection list with supported ByteBlower Server series.
Please select your series. If you don't know the series, contact Excentis to assist.
Next, the installation program will ask you if the detected management interface is correct. How management interfaces are named can be found in this background article.
If it's not correct, please select No. A list will show up to select the correct interface.
After the installation program has determined its essential information, you can specifiy the hostname of your ByteBlower Server.
If you don't know what to do here, you can use the default (byteblower). Press ENTER to continue.
The install environment has all required the information and will install the ByteBlower software to the ByteBlower Server chassis. Depending on your hardware this can take up to 10 minutes.
When the basic installation is almost finished, the install environment will request to remove the installation medium (CD, usb-key) to finish the installation.
When the installation is finished, the server will reboot to the ByteBlower update environment.
Please follow the guide to do an update on the ByteBlower Server

5. Running ByteBlower Server for the first time.

After the initial update after the installation, the ByteBlower server will reboot into the "ByteBlower Server environment".

After booting, a login prompt will appear. Please log in using username "root" and password "excentis".

6. Configuring the ByteBlower server

Since you've re-install the system you will need to run the byteblower-configurator in order to generate the default configuration files.

6.1 Port configuration

We need to configure the ports again so ByteBlower knows how many trunking switches you have. This can be done in some simple steps.
Start the byteblower configurator ( byteblower-configurator )

Select ByteBlower Server Configuration

Port configuration

Depending on the version of server you will have 2 to 4 traffic interfaces. Depending on the license you will have 1 to 4 traffic swithces.
A trunking port is connected to a traffic switch. the others are non-trunk ports.
To configure a port as a trunk select the interface

Select Trunking

Select the number of ports you want to assign to this trunking interface. ( usually it will be 48. If you have doubt, don't hesitate to contact us )

Configure the rest of the traffic ports accordingly to your license. If you are not sure, do ask us at ( support.byteblower@excentis.com )

Go back to the top level and save the configuration

6.2 other configurations

If you want to change the password or configure a fix IP for the system, then you can also use the ByteBlower-configurator.
https://support.excentis.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/140 Information on how to configure the IP

How to: Run older ByteBlower server versions

New versions for the ByteBlower server are released several times a year. It is recommended to run the last released version. This release includes all the latest features and improvements. Howto update the server is described in this article. Sometimes one wants to compare results with a previously released version. This can be configured from the ByteBlower updater. The text below explains how to pick a new version.

This article is written for the 1x00, 2x00, 3x00 and 4x00 ByteBlower models. Downgrading on the new 5100 systems (November 2020) will be slightly different. Do contact us when you are working on this system and need to downgrade.

Downgrading reduces the feature-set of the system. The ByteBlower server has limited forward compatibility, especially changes to the traffic interfaces, management connections or the licensing can break previous releases. Don't hesitate to contact support.byteblower@excentis.com before downgrading, they will help determining the best process.

How to guide

The first step is to ssh into the byteblower-server. With the command excentux-update, the server restarts and boots into the ByteBlower updater mode. This will close the SSH session.

Once the updater has booted, log back in on the system. Depending on the system this might take a while. In the Update system, select the second option and press enter. This is shown in the picture below.

The second option opens a new screen with the available version. Before each version there can be two letter:

'I' : This version is already installed.
'A' : This version is activated. The ByteBlower server will start this version once booted.

In this menu scroll to the version you want to run and press enter. The picture below we select version 2.6.6 of the ByteBlower server. This is already installed, by not activated. After pressing enter, the ByteBlower updater will run perform a number of actions and finally activate the version 2.6.6.

The screen below is the result of activating version 2.6.6. The letters IA indicate that this version will start on bootup. Everything is set up in this menu we can go back to the main menu. This is done with the cancel option at the bottom of the screen.

Once back at the main screen, the system needs to boot back into the ByteBlower server mode. This is done with the Reboot option in the menu (picture below).

At startup, the ByteBlower server will boot the version we've just select (2.6.6.). A final check is possible with the byteblower-get-version command, or the Server view in the ByteBlower GUI.

How to: Configure the management IP

By default the ByteBlower-sever will use DHCP to get its management ip. In some lab-environments this is not wanted. This page explains you how you can configure a fixed-ip on the management interface.

All this configuration is done by using our ByteBlower-Configurator tool on the server.

Start the byteblower-configurator

Dismiss the welcome-screen

Select System Configuration

Select Network configuration

Select the management interface that you want to change. In most cases it will be Interface man0

In "Review the interface configuration" you can see its current configuration. We want to change this to a static ip. Select Connectivity to change the configuration

Provide all the needed information. IPv6 is optional

Everything is configured. Use the TAB-key to select <OK>. Select < Back > to go all the way back to the Main menu

Now save and exit
to apply the configuration

Now your server will have the configured IP-settings.

Expert Info: Releasing the DHCP unique identifier (DUID)

The DHCP server and client recognize each other based on the DUID. This value stays fixed across reboots and tends to ensure that the same devices get the same IP addresses each time. In rare occasions one might want to clear this association.

Clearing the DUID is a manual action and differs between ByteBlower systems. The type can be determined with lsb_release -a In case of doubt, do contact support.

On the Debian based systems, clearing is done as follows:

echo UNINITIALIZED > /var/lib/dbus/machine-id
echo UNINITIALIZED > /etc/machine-id reboot

For the older, Excentux based systems, the following commands are required:

mkdir -p /tmp/images
mkdir -p /tmp/config
mount /dev/disk/by-label/IMAGES /tmp/images
mount /tmp/images/config.img /tmp/config
cd /tmp/config
rm dhcpcd* reboot

How to: Use the Run Title

In this knowledgebase article we will look at the "Run Title" feature in the ByteBlower GUI. This often overlooked feature can be a useful addition to your testing methodology due to its ability to differentiate your testing scenarios based on the device(s) of interest.

We will walk you through a simple example to highlight the usefulness of the "Run Title"

A Simple Project.

We will look at a very simple test case where we have a server and a CPE device.

We will run a simple wired connection test using UDP traffic.

If you would like a reminder of how to do this, please refer to this previous knowledgebase article.

In this example, we have included two flows in our scenario.

Now, we will use the "run title" feature. Choose a name that you would like all of the results to be saved to. In this example, we are going to focus on the CPE1 device itself. This means that whenver we test this device, in this test or other .bbp files and we use the CPE1 run title, all of our results will be conveniently stored in the same place.

Then run the sceanrio.