Solar Winds acquires Kiwi Enterprises, best known for its free management and configuration tools (Syslog).

SolarWinds announced on 5^th of Jan09, it had acquired for an undisclosed sum the assets of New Zealand-based software maker Kiwi Enterprises, best known for its free management and configuration tools.

Picture Courtesy: Solar Winds.

SolarWinds, also known for making freeware versions of its enterprise software available, acquired Kiwi with plans to incorporate the company’s Syslog and CatTools products into its own Orion platform.

“We saw a number of similarities in the products and communities of Kiwi Enterprises and SolarWinds, and expect this acquisition to generate immediate benefit, not only to our respective customer bases, but to the IT community at large,” said Michael S. Bennett, chairman and CEO, SolarWinds. “SolarWinds is committed to delivering deep value to network engineers by addressing their everyday pain, simply and affordably.”SolarWinds will add the Kiwi products, specifically Kiwi Syslog Server and Kiwi CatTools, to its popular line-up of tools for network engineers.  In addition, SolarWinds also expects to use the other software products that it purchased to expand its free tool offerings.

For more details do check the press release from Solar Winds.

Things to be considered before upgrading an IOS in a Cisco 6500 Series Switch with SUP720- Series 1

Today I successfully upgraded the IOS for a Cisco Catalyst 6513 Switch with Supervisor Engine SUP720. Couple of years I faced some problems while I was upgrading the IOS for Catalyst 6513 Switch. In this series I will try to focus on the things to be considered before upgrading an IOS in Cisco Catalyst 6513 Switch.

First and foremost is the TFTP server. The main problem you face is the file size limitations with the TFTP servers. Most of the TFTP servers won’t support more than 30 MB of IOS file to transfer. At that time I was using Solar Winds TFTP server which is an excellent software but cannot support more than 30 MB. The IOS transfer failed exactly after 30 MB of transfer. I was worried what might be the problem, after careful observation I figured out the problem lies with the Solar Winds TFTP server .Then I tried Cisco’s old TFTP server but the same problem. Later on I figured out TFTP server can support more than 30 MB of file transfer.

Hence after changing to 3Coms 3CDaemon Server  &  PacketTrap pt360 Tool Suite FREE edition I could able to transfer the IOS files more than 30 MB. So the main point is to make sure your TFTP server can support more than 30 MB of file transfer as always the image file for Cisco Catalyst 6513 Switch is more than 30 MB in size. Presonally I would recommend the TFTP server from PacketTRAP pt360  Tool Suite

Things to be considered for IOS upgrade series 2