How-To – Activate licenses on Huawei NetEngine 8000

Licenses

You might receive a ton of licenses from your reseller. If they are PDFs, forward them accompanied by the ESN’s of your routers to the huawei support and let them take care of it, it’s a painful process otherwise. Once you get the XML license files you may only have to upload one type of license file to your device: the port activation license which is named something like “NetEngine 8000 XXXXX Fixed Port 10GE Upgrade RTU”. If the license shows “Free From Activation” you don’t have to upload & activate it. Note that in some cases all the licenses were already pre-uploaded on the device when new (N.B. You still need to activate manually the license slots per port though).

You can upload them using the How-To I wrote on How-To: Upload files to Huawei VRP devices.

Activating a port upgrade license

<router> tftp 192.168.0.100 get LICNetEngine8000F1A-8H20Q_V800R021_20220631XXXXX.xml
[~router] license activate 2102353XXXXXXXX.xml
[~router] display license
Active License    : 2102353XXXXXXXX.xml
License state     : Normal
Revoke ticket     : No ticket
License mode      : common

No relevant customer information

Product name      : NetEngine 8000
Product version   : V800R012
License Serial No : LIC20210XXXXXXX
Creator           : Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
Created Time      : 2021-08-25 11:22:33
-------------------------------------------------------------
Feature name      : CRFEA5
Authorize type    : comm
Expired date      : PERMANENT
Trial days        : --
Item name          Item type      Value      Description
-------------------------------------------------------------
LIC20210XXXXXXX      --             10         NetEngine 8000 F1A-8H20Q Fixed Port 10GE Upgrade RTU

LIC20210XXXXXXX     Resource       10         NetEngine 8000 F1A-8H20Q Fixed Port 10GE Upgrade RTU
Item name          (View)Resource License Command-line
-------------------------------------------------------------
LIC20210XXXXXXX      (License)active port-basic slot <slot-id> card <card-id> port <port-list>
Master board license state: Normal.

IMPORTANT: maybe the license is already pre-loaded on the device and you can skip those steps.

Done? Not yet!

Here comes the bitter sweet part. While your devices now got licenses to allow you the use of a bunch of 10, 25, 40, 100 or 400 GE Ports, you can’t just use them.

Indeed, now you will need to activate one license allocation slot to a port before using it:

router# license
router# active port-basic slot 0 card 1 port 28

You can see the allocation now being incremented by one:


			

How-To – Configure clock & ntp on Huawei VRP devices

The official guide to configure the clock and the ntp service is great but it’s difficult to guess what the config bare minimum has to be, so I summed it up here.

Set the time, date, timezone and DST

Just set the actual time this device should show:

<huawei>
clock timezone berlin add 01:00:00
clock daylight-saving-time berlin repeating 01:00 last Sun Mar 01:00 last Sun Oct 01:00
clock datetime 14:51:00 2022-05-04

Configure NTP synchronization

You want to configure a time server to get time synchronized via NTP but you don’t want this device to work as an ntp server itself.

[huawei]
ntp-service server disable
ntp-service ipv6 server disable
ntp-service unicast-server 172.16.0.201

Configure NTP service

If you want to serve time to clients as an actual NTP Server, following config will get you started:

[huawei]
undo ntp-service server disable
undo ntp-service ipv6 server disable
ntp-service refclock-master 2

PS: You may want to configure access control in this case. Check following link for this:

Disable NTP

Completely disable all NTP capabilities on the device.

[huawei]
ntp-service disable

Sources: