Engineering March 2005 Report to CNAG

Upgrading Davis/CIM Switches

Engineering Computing and some Engineering departments will be upgrading some Extreme switches from the former BUL network. Cost, reliability and vendor relations have contributed to this decision. HP looks like a strong contender for these non-routing switches.

Frequent Power Problems

We have noticed frequent and long power outages in E2, which have affected our router and some servers (among other things).

Tue Mar 15 01:30-3:10 E2 power outage (1h 40m)
Sun Mar 13 13:10 CPH/E2 power flicker
Sat Mar 12 01:50-03:00 E2/E3 power outage (1h 10m)
Tue Mar 8 02:10-03:25 E2/E3 power outage (1h 15m)
Fri Mar 4 04:27 E2 power flicker
...
Fri Feb 18 01:12-04:30 E2/E3 power outage (3h 18m)

Alternative power would be helpful when we are out longer than 15 minutes. Our router's UPS lasted about one hour on Sunday, meaning it was out for 10 minutes.

Fire in CPH

There was a fire in CPH last week, smoke and soot were spread around some of Engineering Computing's area. The cleanup crew did an incredible job in cleaning walls, desks, etc. Computer equipment is very sensitive to dust but also vaccuums and other tools of cleaning (polyester brushes), five workstations did not come back up after being cleaned.

We are deferring some cleaning while we prepare temporary or permanent replacement hardware.