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Massive week of code writing, only a few call-outs.
I've got a new toy, well, have here a potentially new toy, I haven't decided yet... A 100baseFX switch. I can interface stuff with the 2924XL-M Cisco with the fiber modules at last. I am having my doubts about it though. It appears to be slow - for example, there is a 50ms ping from the Fiber switch to the Border Router. It's on 100MBit Copper and it's only one hop, technically no hops. I guess that's to be expected with two media conversions in the middle. The other thing that is bothering me is some corrosion on the 100baseTX uplink socket. There is also some corrosion on the inside of the chassis. My primary concern is port 4. It gets "phantom" connections indicating 100baseFX full duplex with traffic (Green and Orange Lights on) with only it's "dummy" (The fiber ends are protected by a rubber dummy that fits into the socket and seals the socket from external dust etc) in. I've been messing about in the switch's configs to try to speed things up, including setting full-duplex, updating via TFTP the onboard software and also configuring some other bits and pieces like auto-negotiation and trunking. Turning all the crap off basically and making it "just" switch the data. I'm going to try some of it's multimedia and streaming stuff later, I believe it has a "low-latency" configuration.
I've been umming and aaahing all week over wether or not to buy it. But as of tonight I have all the info. So, we will see!