Maintenance of Carrier Grade Linux after deployment

1. Carrier Grade Linux
Maintenance
-NAGESH KOLLU

2. Agenda:
 1. Introduction to Carrier Grade Linux (CGL)
 2. why CGL over normal Linux and aspects of CGL ?
 3. Maintenance of CGL after deployment
 Effective monitoring
 Patching (live Linux patching)
 Scalability
 Quality of service
 Failure analysis tools.
 Minimize truck rolling
 Incorporating cutting edge technologies
 4.Conclusion

3. Carrier Grade Linux (CGL)
 Carrier grade is referred to networks or infrastructure where hardware and
software components are extremely reliable and well tested with proven
capabilities.
 Carrier grade is a term for public network telecommunications products that
have requirement of guarantee of 5 or 6 nines reliability that means system is
guaranteed to up 99.999 percent of time, implying a downtime not more than
5 minutes or 30 seconds per year.
 Carrier grade system consist cluster of computing units.
 Carrier grade Linux covers hardware(board support packages), security
,clustering, serviceability and performance requirements of telecommunication
carriers.
 CGL is open source Linux plus features and tools from CGL providers.

4. Why CGL preferred over normal Linux
 Standard Linux distributions is good for everyday personal computers and
non-critical embedded systems like TV’s ,set-top boxes, Phones.
 Brief outage and Downtime doesn’t hurt much.
 Linux kernel missing several features that are needed in telecom
environment such as reliability ,security and scalability.
 Carrier grade Linux is for carrier grade customers where any outage hurts
big time.
 It is mainly used in gateways applications, signaling services applications
and Management applications.
 Using CGL makes faster time to market products.

5. Effective monitoring
 Rapid detection of hardware or software failures requires healthy monitoring.
 Need to check which hardware units are working and which not ?
 Detecting abnormal behavior of processes
 Memory over commit
 Detecting system errors
 Detecting network security threats
 Power monitoring : monitoring power settings based on conditions.
 Watchdog timers
 High fault detection for preventing failed node from corrupting shared resources.
 Black box recorder or event logging : which provides complete log of system activity
from the beginning till the end.

6. Patching:
 Patching is the most important thing in software industry to update
software ,fixing critical errors and new feature enhancements.
 Complexity in CGL is we need to do live Linux patching means patching
while software and system running.
 Security patches : as and when there is a patch or feature that can help
counter dos attacks , ID theft attempts and viruses.
 Performance improvements.

7. Scalability
 Software architectures doesn’t have to design based on resource limits.
 Hot swap insertion and removal of hardware components to increase
capacity.
 Application portability
 Disk mirroring

8. Quality of Service
 The cumulative performance of a network is called Quality of service.
 Need to monitor bitrate ,throughput ,transmission delay and jitter.
 Make use of smart automatic load balancing features to reduce overload
protection.

9. Failure Analysis tools
 Remote debugging : support for dynamic debug of kernel and runtime
applications.
 Kernel panic Handling
 Support for debugging multi-threading applications.
 ECC handling

10. Minimize Truck rolling
 The network consists of cables, switches and servers.
 Detecting location of faulty cables or hardware reduces cost.
 Field service engineers to fix and upgrade live systems while they are
running.

11. Incorporating cutting edge
technologies
 New Features and tools are usually implemented in Linux before they
available on proprietary systems.
 Linux is supported on multiple platforms like ARM,MIPS, Intel
architectures.
 It is fruitful to absorb latest tools and features from open source
community.

12. Conclusion:
 Carrier Grade Linux support is very important after deployment of
products.
 CGL provides great support and tools to monitor health of carrier grade
systems to recover faulty systems and to upgrade existing network.