CHAPTER 5: Basic CSM
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5.3 Upgrading the Concentrator’s Firmware Through CSM
There are several methods available for upgrading your Remote Access Concentrator’s firmware. The first time
you do so—and each subsequent time you upgrade a single Concentrator—you’ll probably want to use the
Concentrator’s Local Management utility as described in
Section 4.3.7
. If you’re using CSM in a multiple-
Concentrator system, however, it will probably be easier to use the methods available through CSM, described
in this section, to simultaneously upgrade your Concentrators.
To use CSM to upgrade the Concentrator’s firmware, the Concentrator must be configured, running, and
able to communicate with the CSM machine. If it is, there are two main ways to upgrade the firmware using
CSM:
1.
With a TFTP server.
This upgrade method requires the least amount of configuration and should be used
under normal circumstances—although, to protect against the rare occurrence of the Concentrator going
down, you may want to leave a TFTP/BootP server running in the background (see #2 below) for
complete reliability. This method is described in
Section 5.3.1
.
2.
With a TFTP/BootP server.
This upgrade method requires more configuration, and is needed only in
unusual circumstances. An example of such a circumstance would be if your site has an unreliable power
source that causes upgrade files to become corrupted by interrupting the file-transfer process. Use a
TFTP/BootP server in these kinds of situations to do a reliable upgrade: If something happens to
interrupt the firmware-transfer process, the process restarts repeatedly until the upgrade is successful.
This method is described in
Section 5.3.2
.