Twitter

While I'm trying new things, I might as well go with twitter. My account is set up (http://twitter.com/garyrichardson). It's connected to my blackberry with gtalk. I think I'm good to go.

Let's see if I'm still using it in 2 weeks!

My Favorite Magazine Is Now Gone!

I started flipping through my lastest copy of Sys Admin Magazine and found this in the Syslog/Note from the Editor section:

This is the last issue of Sys Admin Magazine that you will receive. The magazine is ceasing publication as of this issue.

It's really sad. I looked forward every month to flipping through and reading up. I've subscribed to a few other industry magazines, and none of them have been as good as Sys Admin for showing me the things I care about but didn't know about.

What's worse is that you can see the lack of love and care put into this last issue. The last issue should be an awesome goodbye to the 16 years the magazine has been around.

I haven't heard too much buzz about the magazine going away -- nothing on Slashdot, no other blog posts. Maybe it's because no one else was reading or cared?

My First Experiences with a Black Berry

Just when the iPhones are hitting the US, I'm starting to use a blackberry. I got a Curve. It's a pretty slick little phone.

I've been a Nokia fanboy for about 7 years now, but since I've started using this new phone, I can see how far Nokia has fallen behind in the cellphone world.

I liked how my Nokia peripherals hadn't change since my first phone. I also like the quick access menus -- I could hit menu 1 3 3 to change my profiles quickly. Both of those things are starting to change. New Nokia models apparently have different chargers and the quick menus don't work so well in Symbian OS.

Blackberries all use the mini USB connector for charging, and I imagine that won't change for a while. Bluetooth accessories typically work with all devices as well. Blackberry has a pretty big market for software as well.

The Curve is nice and small too. It's actually smaller than my last Nokia. I think the screen is bigger too.

I haven't had any luck with syncing the blackberry with Macbook Pro. It's not such a huge deal as it syncs to the Exchange Server just fine. If only Address Book and iCal would talk directly to Exchange..

Data plans still suck in Canada. I haven't seen my bill yet, but I'm thinking it'll be about $130 for 50MB of data, 350 minutes of voice, voicemail/caller id and free evenings and weekends. I can't believe people were complaining about the iPhone plans.

Switch Upgrade

Yesterday was the big switch upgrade. We replaced our old Extreme Alpine 3808 with a stack of Cisco 3750's. Here are the obligatory before and after shots:



















We have three 3750's for the workstations and two 3750G's for our servers (yup, finally gig to all the servers). It's all PoE as well. The 3750's all use the StackWise cables to interconnect at something like 32GBits/second. We've also started using CNA to configure and manage the switch, though I'm still a lot more comfortable with the command line.

Here are some things I've learned about doing this sort of thing:

• If you can afford it, pre-wire all of your ports.

This requires purchasing exactly the number of switch ports as your have ports on your patch panel. We've done this with our general office patch panels, but it wasn't really an option with gig server ports.

When trouble shooting and configuring, we can always assume that if your computer is plugged into the wall jack 2-14, it is also going to be plugged into switchport fastEthernet 2/0/14. That means no more searching for mac addresses to locate ports.

• Put your switches as close to your patch panels as you can

This one helped a lot. Before, our servers plugged into the top of the switch, yet the patch panels where at the bottom of the rack. Workstation patch panels were at the top, while the switch ports plugged into the bottom.

This meant we had to use 7' cables in a lot of cases. We also over filled our cable management as all the cables cross each other.

Each switch is now directly across from the patch panel that plugs into it. We used essentially nothing but 4' patch cables and most of those had one or two feet of slack.

• There is no such thing as too much cable management

And you can never get one that's too small.

We added some, but I wish we had more.

• Cable in bunches

Our patch panels group in 12 and our switches group in 16. It made the most sense for us to wire up twelve cables at a time. We plugged them all into the patch and labeled the far end with the port number. We then velcroed the bundle neatly, ran it through the cable management and wired it up.

Before I attempted silly things, like merging bundles, but that just makes it harder to trace bad cables.

We've tested a lot, but I'm sure Monday and Tuesday with both be long days anyway...