[Rack] Gigabit switch installed

Dr. Jesus j at hug.gs
Thu Mar 3 11:52:09 UTC 2011


I took the 3550 and plugged it in so we can plumb gigabit ports
throughout the space.  It's named switch5 and the wiki changelog
should have the rest of the details.  I also played a few rounds of
the find the non-janky GBIC game so most of the switches are on a
gigabit fibre backbone now.

The ultimate reason for this is the laser cutter software, which
requires windows.  It gives us more flexibility to try different
hardware to talk to the laser cutter if we can just network boot
windows, so I set up all the iSCSI+ipxe+initiator+xphacks+WAIK+etc
junk just now to do that from stallion.  Network booting windows goes
way faster over a gigabit connection, so now we have a gigabit pipe
from pony to the DJ booth.

If you want to try it, just modify dhcpd.conf on r00ter to boot a copy
of undionly.kpxe (in my homedir on pony) for a specific mac address,
then whack ctrl+b at the ipxe prompt.  Say dhcp net0, then sanboot
iscsi:172.30.0.10::::iqn.2011-03.net.noisebridge:b1 and you should get
a stock XP image.  If you're really paranoid, remove your disk first
since the image will look at it when it comes up.  I'll add a fancy
menu interface in the near future, so if you want something easy just
wait for that to happen.

As a side effect of all this, kvm works on pony now and the default
PXE boot environment is boot.kernel.org instead of the touchpanel
image.  If you don't know about boot.kernel.org, go PXE boot your
machine the next time you're in the space and kick yourself for ever
putting up with USB flash disks.

jof, I don't have visio.  Could you please modify the network diagram
to reflect recent events?  Thanks.

If anyone has a 5 GHz 802.11n AP they can donate that would be nice
too, seeing as how the servers can serve more than 100 Mbps now and
all.



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