Well this predication came true (“Liverpool destined to win European Cup?”) – I’m guessing that at least two regular readers of this web site will be very pleased.
The reason for lack of bloggage here is that it has been (and continues to be) a ridiculously busy, stressful and tiring time at work: the move to the new building is not going terribly smoothly. In short:
- Fibre cable between our two comms room is dead. This is Bad. The practical upshot is that until the cable is relaid (or we make use of other cable – which our existing equipment isn’t currently capable of using – or rig up a very long run of hastily-put-together Cat5e, thus allowing our two comms rooms to communicate), one half of our offices is unable to communicate with anything: nothing local, nothing outside.
- Yesterday was a particularly bad day – I was having difficulty making equipment in opposite comms rooms talk to each other, due now I know to the faulty cable. The cabling contractors were on-site today and confirmed the fibre bundle was dead, which in a strange way was rather a relief; confirmed that the problem was that someone must have dropped something on the cable during building construction, rather than my failure to make the kit work as advertised.
- Also yesterday, a replacement fibre NIC for our firewall arrived: the installed card, a 1000-Base-SX card, was the wrong sort for the incoming 100-Base-FX fibre from the University; however, even the apparently ‘correct’ card couldn’t be made to work. The incoming fibre was confirmed as alive, the fibre card was confirmed as alive, but they couldn’t negotiate a working network connection. This particular aspect of the work was causing me particular stress and frustration because, without external networking, communication with the rest of the world (colleagues, suppliers, people trying to help etc.) is hard – doubly-so because the comms rooms are mobile-phone black spots. And the proper phones haven’t been installed yet. So, yesterday evening while the Champions League Final was poised at 3-3 (this really demonstrates the nature of my state of mind!) I spent time composing an email to the University computing services with a plea for help. They were very helpful and efficient. Someone came up to the building in the morning with a fibre-to-copper transceiver (converter), allowing us to use a standard 100-Base-TX connection to our firewall. An hour or so later and I had finally figured out the firewall ruleset to allow everything to work properly. BANDWIDTH!
- Tomorrow I hope to set up the email server;
I’m keeping a log of what has been happening with the new building stuff on this page if you’re interested. Really, it’s just a brain dump for me to figure out that progress is actually being made, albeit much slower than we’d hoped.
hmmm… why did you have fibre between comms if they’re close enough to run Cat5?
PermalinkHoorah for the Kings of Europe. Booo to failing network kit
Permalinkyeah, I much prefer cat5e unless I *really* have to use fiber due to distances. Less fragile and easier to manage.
Given you can quite happily run 1000-base-T with UTP cat5e I can’t the the reason for fiber in most situations (and 10GB over cat5e is looking like the full 100m length is do-able fiber is less attractive)
PermalinkComms rooms are a little over 100m apart, so although Cat5e should *work*, fibre will give us proper performance. Didn’t think you could get gigabit over Cat5e for that distance?!?
Permalinkyup gigabit over copper is the full 100m. 10GB over standard cat5e will be a standard this time next year by the looks of it (again full 100m).
You might start to get interesting issues if you start to go way over the 100m though..
PermalinkWell, looks like this ‘untidy’ option is not open to us: we’re gonna get the GBICs and use the single-mode, and the multi-mode will be relaid. Having both will be useful for future redundancy, I guess.
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