Network pics thread

agrikk said:
and pushing five years old. :(
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It amazes me how long management lets stuff fly like this. I need to grab a picture off my phone here of the rack I've pretty well gutted over the last month. Pretty well FULL of older than 5 years servers and such. Now it's down to our physical DC, our Data Repository Server, our physical Exchange server, old physical file server, and a server I'm going to repurpose as our clonezilla server.
 
You think that's bad, we still have a Data General AViiON in production. When purchased in 1997 it ran NT, it has since been upgraded to Win2K.

All because our management is worthless. We pay a hardware guy a good bit of money to keep this piece of junk running as well. His costs alone would have replaced it several times over I'm sure. This thing should have been thrown out the window a decade ago.
 
Haha the financial system at the hospital I use to work at ran on SCO Unix. Completely proprietary, and nobody knew the password to get in the OS, not that we'd even know what to do. It was virtualized in VMware Server on a separate old box. We wanted to move it to our ESX environment so we can decommission the physical box that was running the VM but it would not take if we simply moved the VM file over. We ended up virtualizing the vmware server into ESX. Yes, a VM inside a VM. It was a pretty dirty setup lol. That server would randomly crap out and had to be rebooted. So we ended up having a nightly reboot task. It was my fear that the system would one day go down and never come back up. Due to how proprietary it is it's not like you can just boot up with a rescue disk and try to access the data. It was some proprietary file system and everything. Nobody really knew what was on it other than finance needed it to be up or they'd come tell us "the server is not working".

That environment had a lot of that. So glad I don't work there anymore. :p Tons of NT4 servers too that are super critical, but because of the proprietary nature of the software they can't upgrade it. I never understood businesses and their fascination with proprietary solutions, especially when they choose really oddball companies that come and go.
 
JohnYYC said:
Here's a shot of the NOC where I work. The wall on the left of the image is actually a different layout now. Had the pleasure of seeing it in person last month. I work in Calgary and the NOC is in Toronto.
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What sort of program provides those bandwidth charts?
 
Red Squirrel said:
Also, the bottom two enclosures are currently unusable, because I went and used a couple drives as regular sata drives, and that broke the firmware lock on them (was not aware till after) so they no longer work in the SAN. I have to figure out which drives these are and decommission them. The reason I built this server instead of just using this SAN is because of this. I can't just put any sata drive in there. So I will use it as extended storage since I have it, but wont rely on it for actual productivity stuff. Will be mostly for backups/archiving.
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FWIW, if those storage heads are IBM Fast-T storage heads with LSI FlexLine style controllers (have an RS232 serial port on the back), you can force them to use any disk inserted and not just "firmware locked", or more correctly, firmware signed disks.

I wrote a post on HDDGuru a while back that unlocked a LSI StorageTek 2655 (uses nearly identical controllers to the IBM Fast-T).

http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic....&sid=b0ab2a2ba7daaba9ceb9df5e6cb8afd8#p129802

You might wanna try that.
 
gatekeep said:
FWIW, if those storage heads are IBM Fast-T storage heads with LSI FlexLine style controllers (have an RS232 serial port on the back), you can force them to use any disk inserted and not just "firmware locked", or more correctly, firmware signed disks.

I wrote a post on HDDGuru a while back that unlocked a LSI StorageTek 2655 (uses nearly identical controllers to the IBM Fast-T).

http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic....&sid=b0ab2a2ba7daaba9ceb9df5e6cb8afd8#p129802

You might wanna try that.
Click to expand...

Interesting. So I need the SAN head for this though? I don't have the SAN head, just 4 enclosures, I use them more as a DAS. They connect to the fibre channel card and the OS sees the drives.
 
Not exactly network related per say, but I framed behind my server room (doing the whole basement). Going to be a little tight back there...

 
JohnYYC said:
Here's a shot of the NOC where I work. The wall on the left of the image is actually a different layout now. Had the pleasure of seeing it in person last month. I work in Calgary and the NOC is in Toronto.

nVk2SGl.jpg
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thats sexy, we have hosting in Q9 Toronto downtown, it is one sexy data center!
 
Red Squirrel said:
Interesting. So I need the SAN head for this though? I don't have the SAN head, just 4 enclosures, I use them more as a DAS. They connect to the fibre channel card and the OS sees the drives.
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Ah ok ... so they don't have the head unit they just have the expansion controllers. However, if they are the smart expansion controllers they might still have a RS232 or rollover ethernet connection if so you could still access the VxWorks shell and try those commands.

EDIT: RS; do you have a up-close pic of the back of those units?
 
Question, i had one guy tell me once that connecting a device to device, like a switch to switch, you should use a min, of 1m cable, otherwise you can get too much cross talk between those devices..

any truth to this as i see alot of people using short cables between devices..
 
In twenty years of networking, I've never once heard of such a thing and use 6" cat-5 all the time.
 
I've never heard of cross talk being created due to a short cable like that... It may be possible, but I doubt it's real significant.
 
gatekeep said:
Ah ok ... so they don't have the head unit they just have the expansion controllers. However, if they are the smart expansion controllers they might still have a RS232 or rollover ethernet connection if so you could still access the VxWorks shell and try those commands.

EDIT: RS; do you have a up-close pic of the back of those units?
Click to expand...

Here's a pic of the back:



And one of the controllers:



Actually my first time opening one of those, who would have thought there would be ram in there! Looks like quite a sophisticated controller. Sadly I don't see any way I can interface with it though.

Other random pics, for fun of it:

PSU:



Fans:



One of the smaller drives:



Front:
 
Are all 4 disk shelves identical? I have an Older FastT at work, and the SAN looks Identical to the expansion shelves from the front, but from the rear there are some obvious differences.
 
The top two have 400GB drives and are slightly newer and the bottom 2 are 250GB drives, but as far as I can tell they're identical. I think they were purchased at separate times though so one could be a few revisions different or what not.
 
I suppose it's enough for what it's being used for though. 8MB of ram used to be able to run a full blown OS at one point.
 
Some of the empty, yet built out datacenter space in my building. Been sitting vacant for I think at least 5 years now sadly.

IMG_00000026s.jpg

IMG_00000027s.jpg
 
Red Squirrel said:
Here's a pic of the back:



And one of the controllers:



Actually my first time opening one of those, who would have thought there would be ram in there! Looks like quite a sophisticated controller. Sadly I don't see any way I can interface with it though.
Click to expand...

Ya you have expansion only heads no controllers. Its hard to reinitialize the expansion heads as you'd need to tap the RS232 header inside the controller (and power it at the same time). The expansion heads have "dumb" controllers, but still have firmware which is why you can't just attach any disk (and why it acts like a JBOD), the IBM Fast-T and LSI/Sun StorageTek systems use the same controllers, firmware and management software. You'd need to get some FlexLine controllers from fleabay or elsewhere to make that work fully again.
 
Ohh, you Datacenter guys and your servers...

Need to pick one up, just for familiarity.

Rack redesign.

Not sure if there are any non-open source networkers here, but, this rack and others will be available for rent soon for lab studies. The switch lab here is in beta right now, an appointment taking site is up and running, and it should be pretty convenient for around $10 a day for the CCNP rack, and $7.50 a day (23hrs) for the CCNA/CCNP rack. TFTP access to save configs, and practice upgrading IOS on a router in the CCNA rack soon. Should be ready to go after a bit more hardening sometime next week.

Frame-Relay for the CCNP rack is coming as soon as a few more modules arrive.

VaXkxh6O0qs0zzHo2apwtcxieGTILO0mMNEbcQ2u6no=w155-h207-p-no


Topo:

VKbpJMiCxT02Fd_swwmLSbOfBnPaOwKGqt7wXoJpyl8=w448-h207-p-no


menu driven access:

Q-hs7IlJTsbdf1oE1hUm9JHE-9nCreVH191-kfpVrO0=w483-h207-p-no


The Idea behind it, is Cheap, easy to use, simple to manage. Not a get rich overnight endeavor, but build it up slowly with good customer service and good value.

Most people here are pretty close to guru status already and probably don't need this, but I sell them as well, on ebay, in small table top racks. Definitely not cheap... but convenient. probably worth the not having to build cabling yourself, or not. Who knows.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/251291203439?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

http://www.ebay.com/itm/251291113080?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
 
gatekeep said:
Ya you have expansion only heads no controllers. Its hard to reinitialize the expansion heads as you'd need to tap the RS232 header inside the controller (and power it at the same time). The expansion heads have "dumb" controllers, but still have firmware which is why you can't just attach any disk (and why it acts like a JBOD), the IBM Fast-T and LSI/Sun StorageTek systems use the same controllers, firmware and management software. You'd need to get some FlexLine controllers from fleabay or elsewhere to make that work fully again.
Click to expand...

Hmm my coworker I used to work with has the head enclosure, would it be the thing of simply inserting that controller into one of my enclosures then reflashing all of em? I don't talk to him much though. Also I have a FC switch, not sure if I can do something through that maybe?
 
Red Squirrel said:
Hmm my coworker I used to work with has the head enclosure, would it be the thing of simply inserting that controller into one of my enclosures then reflashing all of em? I don't talk to him much though. Also I have a FC switch, not sure if I can do something through that maybe?
Click to expand...

Should be as simple as putting the head controller in the units to reinitialize the drives. FC switch isn't gonna help you much, here as it doesn't really have anything to do with this particular function of the controllers.
 
Just received a cisco 2801 for the home lab, was to cheap to pass up on ebay (about $45).



The guts



It in the Lab (will cable this weekend)


Interesting it looks like it has 2 slots for old-school flash chips wonder if they are utilized in any way.
 
scline said:
Interesting it looks like it has 2 slots for old-school flash chips wonder if they are utilized in any way.
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Those didn't have slots for flash. I think you are referring to the PVDM2 slots. They are there to provide resources for conferencing, transcoding, and voice termination. The PVDM3 can mix video :eek: but that's for another thread..lol
 
jahsoul said:
Those didn't have slots for flash. I think you are referring to the PVDM2 slots. They are there to provide resources for conferencing, transcoding, and voice termination. The PVDM3 can mix video :eek: but that's for another thread..lol
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took the words right out of my mouth...:mad: :p

2900s have PVDM slots as well. i've installed a few pvdm 64s in my day. :)
 
The not so pretty side of being the IT guy. We have recently closed this site/server room down, so having to move data, retire servers, unplug stuff, throw stuff away, figure out what we want to keep, want to rebuild etc. List goes on and on.

Most of the stuff is thankfully being retired, our new server room/DC is built so it's just shuffling data around.

Servers here are DL380 G5's, a HP MSA, some fibre channel switches, old SAN etc.

Will re-use only HP DL380 G6's and higher. Cisco 3560G's or higher. Maybe some of the SAS drives from the servers as spares.

OldSvR.JPG
 
closet I have to tackle soon, upgrade the building ot 10gig uplink turned into fix their giant mess


 
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