Craft Terminal is Nokia's stinking Weendoze GUI tool which one has to put up with in order to perform the following functions:
Connect to the D50 via serial PPP when the IP setup for Ethernet is missing or unusable, in the absence of a non-Weendoze way to do so. (We've been able to connect to R5.1 using a non-Weendoze PPP implementation, but not to R11.1.1.)
Perform all those management functions which are done via SNMP, until someone finds a better way to do it that doesn't require Weendoze. These functions include:
Configuring IP setup for the management Ethernet interface so one can poke at the VxWorks insides using a standard non-Weendoze host. (As we see it, if you are only going to use Craft Terminal, you might as well not bother with Ethernet at all: since you need the serial PPP connection for the initial configuration in any case, just stick with that.)
Telling the D50's internal MIB what cards it should expect. The MIB stored on the MCP indicates which cards are expected to be in which slots, and if the actual detected configuration doesn't match what's been entered into the MIB, the D50 gets unhappy about it. One is supposed to use Craft Terminal to enter the expected system configuration.
Doing the actual xDSL provisioning: configuring data rates and other parameters on the xDSL ports and making data path connections.
Our FTP site has both Weendoze install packages and PDF documentation for Craft Terminal, several different versions. The earlier versions want NT 4.0; the later ones accept that or Win2k.
Whereas Craft Terminal was intended to be installed on the laptops of CO field technicians and to talk to one D50 at a time, the Administration Utilities suite was apparently intended to be run from a centralized NOC. It supports the following functions:
Upgrading the firmware on a D50 (or D50e) node to the version included in the Weendoze software install as a payload. See this page for more information.
Backup/restore of the D50 MIB. We haven't looked into this function.
Whereas Craft Terminal offers the choice of connecting to the target D50
using either the serial PPP hack or a standard IP
connection (Ethernet), the MultiUpgrader
tool offers no such choices.
Instead it is designed to push the code to one or more (typically remote)
DSLAMs in parallel, and the list of D50/D50e nodes to be subjected to the
code push is configured via an ad hoc spreadsheet-like tool.
The Name
column in that spreadsheet-looking thingie is not for some
arbitrary housekeeping names
; instead it is the place where one enters
the DNS hostname or IP address of the target D50.
(Entering 192.168.0.23 and bringing up the DiamondCraft
connection
manually did NOT work; it really does need to be Ethernet.)
Having no desire to get into enabling Ethernet under Weendoze, we had temporarily opened our D50's management IP address to the public Internet and hired an outside IT consultant to run the bloody Weendoze software. He had no problem with installing the Administration Utilities suite (from our FTP site) under Windows XP, and as soon as he used a NAT-free Internet connection to reach our D50, the operation succeeded on the first try without any issues.
Now that we have a Demi board and anyone else who
would like one as well can get one by sponsoring our
Demi clone project, the MultiUpgrader
Weendoze tool is no longer necessary: one can instead use the Demi to load
any desired code version onto the MCP card directly, and one can also program
non-MCP cards to arbitrary versions, including the option of going back to an
earlier version which isn't possible otherwise.
The next thing we need to figure out is how to configure the external Ethernet IP address (stored in an EEPROM on the MCS backplane) via VxWorks. If one can figure out how to do this via VxWorks, it can then be done via the Demi as well, which would eliminate the need to mess with the cumbersome serial PPP interface.
Finally, once all cards in your D50 system have been programmed to the desired version via DEMI and the external Ethernet interface has been configured, we need a non-Weendoze SNMP client to do the rest of the standard management tasks. If someone can put that together, the need to use Weendoze for D50 work would be eliminated completely.