Swordie Bloggie

One of the many to get Hewlett Packard ProCurve switch… need to replace the more than 10 years old Cisco hubs… yes HUB… but all of them… about 16 units with each having 16 UTP ports and a single fiber port as backbone have been running strong like bull… 24×7… for the past 10 years or so… and they are all rackmount type… and they cost a bomb each during its heyday… 😀

HP ProCurve switch with 24 UTP ports and 4 dual-personality ports for fiber connection.

So, 2010 is going to be a challenging year… to keep up the speed demand… or is it speed demon… speed hungry applications… 😛 But we can only speed up the LAN… for the LAN applications… but there is no way for us to get a better WAN speed… 😛 hoping 2010 will give us more WAN speed for us to reach the world out there… 😛

HP Mini GBIC for fiber connection.

Mounting kit for the rackmount switch.

Today I have to attend a networking course for 3 days at Mercure Hotel located at 1Bornoe’s Tower A, at level 17 of the hotel to be precise.

IPv6 is the next generation of the internet protocol… the de-facto protocol to communicate through the internet. Currently we are all using the IPv4 but it is running out of public IPs.

The course is not very tough but the ‘sleepy’ make it very tough especially after food. Foods are more than enough… for the next 3 days, sure will gain weight and tummy will get bigger 😀

Talking about tummy… there is a type of cancer called mesothelioma which develops in the mesothelial cells. Mesothelial are tissue which produce lubricating fluid to protect and allows organs like lungs, heart, and stomach to move smoothly.

OK, back to the IPv6 course… there are 11 participants and the first day is mostly looking at the white board. And the white board is not big enough until the lecturer has to use the glass wall in the room to write.

Hopefully tomorrow will be more ‘awakening’ since we will do labs.

While searching for information about Cisco hub, I came across with Sapia Network. They are selling used network stuffs like router, switch, VoIP phone, and many more. The used network devices in their offering are from well know brands like Cisco, Juniper, Foundry, Extreme, Marconi, Riverstone and Brocade.

I was not looking for used cisco hub or anything but I just want to get some information about our old Cisco FastHub. You must be wondering why I keep on mentioning ‘hub’ instead of ‘switch’.

Well, our network was setup in the late nineties, around 1997. During that time, switch is not that commonly available and it can cost a bomb… but not as much as a warhead 😀

Our backbone are taken care by the 12 ports Cisco FastHub 100 FX, all 12 ports are fiber port. And the rest of the hub are Cisco FastHub 300 series, which has 16 ports only. The 16 ports are 15 100BaseTX ports and one 100BaseFX port for linking UTP devices to a fiber Fast Ethernet backbone. If I ask you to guess the price of the 16 ports Cisco FastHub on that time, you will not be able to give me a correct guess. Well, the cost of the hub at that time is almost RM10K each… yes almost RM10k for a mere 16 ports hub… not even a 16 ports switch!

Today, a 16 ports switch will cost less than RM1k, depending on the brand and features it has. But although switch technology is faster than hub, some of today’s switch will not be able to beat that more than 10 years old Cisco FastHub technology… it is rock solid! They have been working 24×7 since 1997. Of course we lost some of it because of bad main power supply… but 80% are still working.

After searching for answer from the net, I found one which somehow explains what might have gone wrong with my website yesterday… it’s in my previous posting.

You see, all of us are accessing our website’s files from the server across the network. And we might be using Network File System (NFS) which is a network file system protocol. NFS allows us to access the files freely as if they are attached to our local disks.

It explained NFS has mechanisms to help it cope with error conditions. But what happen to my two folders yesterday? It went deadlock. No one have access to it. I think this is where the Stale File Handles was used to fix the two problematic folders by un-mounting and re-mounting the whole devices in my website services through service restart by the 24×7 support team.

If your job involved servers, routers or anything attached to any network, I’m hundred percent sure this little tool is one of your best friend. Telnet is the name which is indispensable to any network admin or system admin. For the past few days, I have been struggling managing and configuring some of the network devices remotely. Without telnet, I think I will get blisters on my foot for walking up and down to the devices and to my room. Telnet helps me to access the devices on the network remotely. You can even use telnet across the ocean through the internet if you want to, that’s how indispensable telnet is.

Organization with branch offices which have server at their branch will put their system and network administrators a hard time managing servers.  When IT installations such as server encounter a problem, it is not easy to perform troubleshooting without going to the site.

But with today’s technology like the Uplogix Envoy Management Station (EMS), IT administrators are not necessary to be on site to perform troubleshooting. Uplogix Envoy centralizes point of control and delivers real-time monitoring and management capabilities, offering a unified view of what’s occurring in the distributed infrastructure. Network administrators can monitor connectivity, fix problems, automate maintenance tasks, and log changes for the entire network from one location. To ensure security, Uplogix Envoy employs the strongest security, encryption, and authentication standards for communications between the sites.