Filler

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by

awa
in ,

I’m exhausted. I’ve been pulling fiber for the last two days. All part of an infrastructure upgrade.

Normally, pulling cable in a modern datacenter is pretty easy. This is not a modern datacenter.

The original cable runs were CAT6 with RJ45 connectors. When the cables were installed, the installation had to be nondestructive. No holes in walls, no holes in floors. Hide the cables as best you can.

One of the cables we removed was to a defunct workstation. It had been run across the floor and then covered with a protective layer to keep it from getting cut or snagged. The outer insulation had been ripped away. There was bare copper showing. Fortunately, that particular workstation hasn’t been in place for a few years.

The backbone switch was mounted in the basement. Not a real issue. The people who pulled some of the last cable didn’t bother to put in any cable hangers. So it had loops just dangling.

There were drops that could not be identified. Those are now disconnected, but nobody complained, so nothing was taken offline.

I’ve found a new favorite cable organizer.

Cable Management Wire Organizer

These are reusable. They open fully and will hold many cat6 and even more fiber. They have the 3M foam double-sided tape on them. This works great against smooth, clean surfaces.

The place where they shine is that they also have a hole designed for a #6 screw. In places where there were no smooth surfaces, much less clean surfaces. The sticky held them in place long enough to drive a screw.

There are no more dangling cables.

My only hope is that there are no more configuration issues with the new switch. *caugh*DHCP*caugh*

        

Comments

2 responses to “Filler”

  1. Jolie Avatar
    Jolie

    Oh, look, DHCP did manage to give me two identical IPs on the network. Yay.

    Reply
    1. awa Avatar
      awa

      The new switch decided it would not forward BOOTP(port 67/UDP). That instead I had to set up DHCP-RELAY. Of course, the entire CLI and GUI interfaces to the new switch is undocumented. I’m just glad they have English words.

      This wasn’t working. So I turned on the DHCP-SERVER. I gave it the subnet to use. All looks good. Except… Some ports were still getting DHCP from the old DHCP server. And the new DHCP server proceeded to assign xx.xx.xx.1 to a security camera. Even though it is hard-coded to the router.

      So my router and the security camera were arguing over who should get packets.

      My biggest issue with the new switch has been thinking about it as a switch. It is not. It is a router that comes preconfigured to act like an “enterprise” switch.

      I think the network issues are currently resolved.

      My last minor issue is either a dead port, a dead patch cable (likely) or a dead switch. I’ve not done isolation on the switch yet, as there were other things that were more urgent.

      You are absolutely correct, to MACs with the same IP.

      Reply

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