I'm looking after Liam this weekend. Kel has taken a casual job. She loves it so far, helps her get out of the house for a while. I also re-arranged the entire living room today. It was crappily laid out. I swapped where the armchairs were to where the cabinet is against the wall. That way Liam has more empty carpet area to play on and everything fits better. I bought a Cisco Catalyst 2924M with two 100baseFX (ST Fibre Optic) modules with two ports each. It's a 24 port switch with two slots for modules.

I currently use MiniCom and a serial console cable to talk to it. I thought I'd try to get that working rather than the boring old HyperTerminal in windows. /dev/ttyS1 ftw! I am slowly learning some commands and procedures with the switch. I have turned off the fiber modules because they are unused [orange lights]. I also turned off the port that the wireless router is on as it's not configured yet. I love it!

Before this switch could go in, I had to do something about the noise! This switch is designed to run in an enterprise situation in a rack, in a closet or data center where no one has to live next to it. It's got three 80mm fans that run at 12 volts. Full speed. It literally sounds like a vacuum cleaner. The noise is second only to the PowerEdge 2400s (Which will be treated to a similar mod soon).

To make this switch suitable, I unplugged the three fans then made an external power cable for them. I did this rather than modifying the internal PSU or tapping one of the 12V lines. That way the internals remain as original as possible. A big variable voltage lab power supply is currently running the fans in the switch and in the ADSL router until I get time to knock up a quick variable power supply.

The best way to go was to stick some rubber feet on it and run the cables underneath, then it's nice and tidy.