I’m back after a few months of “silence” on the blog, to report some problems I’m running into while upgrading and deploying Citrix NetScaler instances with firmware 14.1-29.63_nc_64.
As I’ve described in several articles on this blog, over time I’ve set up several lab environments where I can test the technologies I get my hands on at work, but in an isolated, risk-free environment.
During these quiet days (the last days of my vacation) I wanted to spend some time updating my lab environment, and one of the components that needed upgrading was the Citrix NetScaler VPX instance.
The existing version was based on NetScaler release 13.1, and I wanted to upgrade it to 14.1-29.63_nc_64.
As I’ve done hundreds of times, I uploaded the new firmware to the instance and started the upgrade process.
Once the upgrade finished, the instance rebooted, and when it came back up the problems started:
- the administration page was not available over HTTPS (only over HTTP)
- I couldn’t log in to the web administration page with the credentials I had set before, while over SSH the same credentials were validated correctly
Given these problems, I remembered reading on X.com a few days earlier about similar issues after a firmware upgrade, so I decided to export the configuration and the SSL certificates and reinstall a new instance from scratch (since it’s a lab, service availability isn’t an issue for me).
But the problems didn’t end there. I downloaded the .ova version so I could load it into my VMware lab environment; I went through the usual import procedure and powered on the VM; the virtual machine stays stuck powering on in VMware at 66% and doesn’t do anything.
I left the VM in this state overnight, and the next day I found it at the console prompt asking me to configure the management IP:
After configuring the IP, subnet and gateway, I rebooted it, and the VM got stuck again at 66% during boot…
So I decided to leave this VM powering on and try deploying a second one; same result.
When the first VM finally came up, this is what the console showed:
trying to log in via the web with the default credentials, this is the result:
Trying to log in at the console with nsroot/nsroot:
what’s going on?? I’m afraid Citrix really dropped the ball with this firmware…
Update, October 3, 2024
Yesterday I finally got back to working on my lab NetScaler instance and reinstalled it on my new lab based on Nutanix CE 2.1. So I installed a new NetScaler 14.1-29.63_nc_64 instance for KVM (a while ago I wrote a guide on how to install NetScaler ADC instances on Nutanix https://www.silviobalduzzi.com/en/2020/04/citrix-adc-vpx-on-nutanix-ahv-en/) and upgraded it to the 14.1-29.65_nc_64 package, which is recommended for anyone who wants to run the Freemium edition (mine is a lab, so that’s more than fine!!), and that way the installation worked.
As I said, though, I had to upgrade to the 14.1-29.65_nc_64 package, because web access to 14.1-29.63_nc_64 doesn’t work (you can only log in at the console).
After the upgrade I was able to restore the configuration of my old instance, so I once again have the features provided by NetScaler ADC available in my lab.