Thursday, March 4, 2010

The Way Of The Dinosaur


It's been a
long time. I can't remember how long, and I'm too lazy/busy to look it up. But somewhere around two (yep, count 'em, TWO!) years ago we had a major problem at work. One of our Cisco Catalyst 6509 core Ethernet switch had major problems. Turns out we had some bent pins on the backplane in slot 2. In laymen's terms, the place where you plug the brains into the switch was broke. We still had one "brain" (a.k.a. supervisor module) but the redundant one couldn't be used. The only solution to get our redundancy back? Replace the whole chassis.

Replacing an entire switch chassis is NOT a small job. There were literally hundreds of servers connected to this switch in the data center. So we set out on a very. long. journey. We got a replacement chassis from Cisco and sloooooooowly began moving one server network connection at a time from the old switch to the new switch.

Fast forward to today. Thanks to a big push in the last few days by some coworkers and me, we currently have only 7 more connections on this switch. And if things go according to plan, they'll all be changed to the new switch by Saturday afternoon. (Yeah, I have to go to work on Saturday. And it's supposed to be nice weather, too! Bummer...)

Some might not see the significance of this accomplishment, but those of us that have worked on it over these many months are psyched! We've scheduled a ceremonial power-off ceremony for Monday afternoon. Two of us will switch off the dual redundant power supplies, and everyone present will have the opportunity to disconnect one of the many ancient RJ-21 Ethernet cable connections. It will be stupendous when this switch makes itself extinct, and we can go on with our other more exciting, less mundane, projects.