Re: Questions about IS5031 IB switch licenses and cards

Progress! I contacted Mellanox support through their support website. Very fast response.

If your switch was sold after 2012, it should have the FabricIT/Subnet Manager license on the underside of the pull out tab. If it was not, you need to contact technical support with your switch's serial number and they can check for it internally. UPDATE: you'll likely have to contact sales instead...there's only a small chance that technical support has a license registered for your switch if it's not on underside of pull out tab. UPDATE UPDATE: Do not contact sales. see later reply

They said that when you upgrade FabricIT, which runs the subnet manager, that the firmware also gets upgraded automatically. The last FabricIT version (you can see your switch's version using the "show version" command) is 1.1.3004, and the hardware is end of life, so if you have that version then you don't need to do any upgrades. Mine is 1.1.2500, so I need to upgrade it.

Process for upgrading FabricIT software and firmware of IS5030 or IS5031 IB switches:

1. Download latest firmware image. This is the link they gave me, but it might be temporary. Here it is on my google drive.
2. Starting from Section 5.1, follow the instructions in “FabricIT Enterprise Fabric Management Software User Manual For EFM Rev 1.1.3004”. (This is the link they gave me, link on my google drive.). This assumes you can already ssh into the switch. If not, read the Installation Guide (available online) or earlier sections of that User Manual for how to setup the ethernet port.
3. I had to modify the given steps slightly. Note that I configured my switch with a static IP of 192.168.0.3. Here are my modifications:

1. Since I didn’t set up a user or password, the ssh login was “ssh -l admin 192.168.0.3”.
2. I didn’t have any images available to be installed, so I skipped the deletion step.
3. If you are using a modern linux system to ssh into the switch in order to scp from the switch, you will receive an error “no kex alg”. The is because some of the kex algorithms have been found to have security vulnerabilities since the time the switch was made, and so have been excluded. You need exit out of the switch ssh, then append the following line to your /etc/ssh/sshd_config: “KexAlgorithms diffie-hellman-group1-sha1,ecdh-sha2-nistp256,ecdh-sha2-nistp384,ecdh-sha2-nistp521,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256,diffie-hellman-group14-sha1” (without quotes). Then restart sshd. Then log back into the switch. You should remove that line when you’re done with scp and restart sshd.
4. My scp line looked like “image fetch scp://<Linux username>@192.168.0.1/home/<Linux username>/Downloads/image-PPC_M405EX-EFM_1.1.3004.img”, where the IP address is the IP address of your computer's ethernet adapter. It then prompted me for a password and I input my Linux account’s password. This worked: "show images" showed an image ready to be installed.
5. I wasn’t prompted to save configuration.
6. After reload, I had to wait about 5 minutes in order to ssh back into it. After running “show version”, the new firmware was present.
7. All other steps were the same as in the User Manual.

As for the upgrade to 36 ports license, they directed me to sales@mellanox.com. I sent them an email, so we'll see... Also still waiting on the subnet manager license. The HCAs that were confirmed to work at QDR with the Sun switch are still only operating at 20 Gb/s with the IS5031 switch with opensm running on one of the nodes. UPDATE: Don't contact sales. See later reply.