Today I fitted a new set of bearings to the bench grinder. It runs great now. Very smooth.

Just got home from work. Interesting day - very busy. I changed out one of the core switches today. Very nice piece of kit. The job is a little nerve racking as you must be quite careful of the surrounding connections. Knocking one of those out or kinking a fiber cable and breaking the filaments means very sad times.

I had to push the switch out of the back of the rack, due to patching on the front side. This meant extracting the switch on the front size 80-100mm and then removing the ears on the sides. It was then able to slide to the rear of the rack.

The core switch is a HP Procurve 48 port gig switch. It's got 4 gig fiber uplinks. The other really cool part is the module in the back. The HP J9049. This module allows you two CX4 stacking ports as well as two 10gig GBIC slots.

The lab has expanded somewhat. I now have two layer 3 switches, one with POE for Asterisk work and a new HP 48 port. I also have some loaner firewalls to play with Juniper NS5-GT. I've got VTP going over the cisco switches for vlan management, the HP doesn't talk VTP unfortunately. All of the uplinks, other than to the dumb gig switch are dot1q trunks which carry the vlans between switches.

The Junipers will be serving DHCP and either NATting or Routing for a few vlans which will sit behind the ESXi hosts, more as a learning tool rather than doing anything useful.

I am now hunting down some mini-GBICs for the HP so that I can link the POE switch at gigabit speeds.

Next on the agenda 3 x cisco routers and all the serial crap to go with them.

I managed to track down a newer image with crypto (k) for my Cisco 2950T. So I upgraded it today, rolled the keys and enabled SSH.

I managed to get Asterisk up with FreePBX. Compiled from source - the rpms don't play nice with the current version of FreePBX. It takes a damn long time to build from source on an Atom machine... Next job is to hook up the SPA3102 as an analogue extension and a pstn trunk.

Bought a pair of HP 2650 switches on eBay - very cheap. Unfortunately they weren't packed very well, so the front bezel and GBIC slot on one of the switches are smashed. The seller was very good though. They partially refunded. These are layer 3 capable and should do well sitting behind my ESXi hosts.

I had a bit of a mess around with the new POE switch and the 7940 handsets tonight. I spun up a pre-made Elastix VM which is a CentOS distro with FreePBX and Asterisk integrated - and a bunch of other stuff to make life easier.

I scored a Cisco WS-C3550-24PWR-SMI on eBay.

Once it arrived I gave it a quick test with a Panasonic VOIP handset, the handset was power cycling its self on and off and this was appearing on the console of the switch:

%ILPOWER-3-CONTROLLER_PORT_ERR: Controller port error, Interface Fa0/9 : Power given, but link is not up

I thought to myself, damn, the POE is stuffed on this switch... However after some reading, I discovered that the switch is actually pre-802.3af standard. The IOS image above a certain versino, however, has been fixed so that the switch can provide power to compliant devices. The reason the pana didn't work correctly is because it doesn't boot and bring the link 'up' fast enough for the switch. The switch hits a timeout and turns off the POE on that port. The timeout can be adjusted like this:

power inline delay shutdown 20 initial 300

The switch looks like it's had a hard life though! It came pretty poorly wrapped - but it made it through in-tact. The thing is full of dust.

IMG_20130803_143056.jpg