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Saturday, September 11 2010 @ 12:06 AM UTC

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Museum Server Racks - Part 3

We have cooling!



The first server has been installed:




We also have a server rack in one of the upstairs collection rooms. We just finished moving a compute cluster that performs phylogenetic analysis from our old building into this new server rack.

Unfortunately we ran into a problem. It seems that the network cabling contractors ran their certification tests before they finished labeling the back of the patch panels. Some of the ports of our brand new installation do not work! This has been fairly discouraging, but the issue should be resolved soon.







Here you can see our cable management efforts. This is a nice, clean installation that will be easy to maintain over time.

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Museum Server Racks - Part 3
Authored by: Dan Stoner on Thursday, April 24 2008 @ 09:23 AM UTC
It turns out that only the main server space with four racks had the trouble of the contractors mucking with the wires after they ran the certification tests. We have not yet heard of a resolution path for this issue.

The individual rack upstairs had a completely different problem that our campus network engineers believe is some kind of Cisco bug in the VTP Pruning feature. The workaround in place is to turn off VTP Pruning.

The symptoms of the VTP Pruning issue:

1. The server randomly loses connectivity (ability to ping or be pinged). IP connectivity usually comes back on its own withing 10 minutes to an hour

2. Unplugging the network cable and plugging it back in causes the server to lose its ability to ping the Default Gateway. However during this time the server can ping other hosts on the same subnet. Network capture shows arp requests going out but the server never gets a response from the gateway.


Our new server spaces have had a rough start but we hope to have all of these issues behind us in a few weeks.
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