Ricky Beam wrote:
Comparing MAC addresses everytime you need to know
where something
is attached is very time consuming and error prone. *Maintain* the
documentation. That's pretty easy as there's only one monkey movin'
cables.
Well, one problem we have is that the monkey (me) gets called out of
the country with some increasing regularity. Another problem we have
is that another monkey (Aaron, at the colo) is going to untangle the
current mess of wires and neatly tie everything into the rack
properly, but is waiting at the moment for us to decide about a switch
solution.
I certainly agree that maintaining documentation is critical here, but
at the same time I think it's pretty important that we are able to do
this maintenance *remotely*. Certainly, I don't think anyone is
advising that we "compare MAC addresses everytime we need to know" --
rather it's just that for debugging/troubleshooting/oddities, it will
be great for us to have the *ability* to figure out which mac address
is plugged in where.
Really? I've not seen anyone complaining about
them. (I've not been
sitting on IRC for awhile, tho') We're always going to run out of
switch ports. *I* run out of ports in my own living room -- 'tho
a $5,000 48 port 10/100/1000 managed switch would be nice, I'll
stick with the $100 8 port one's from Linksys/Netgear/D-link.
We're looking at a cost differential for 48 ports of roughtly $1500
versus $3500. Even if we grow to 10x our current needs (480 ports
added, let's say) the total cost differential would be "only" $20,000.
That's a large expense, to be sure, but not in the context of what our
overall costs will be in such an environment.
Remote managability doesn't have anything to do
with the mess. The mess
is 100% human related -- near-constant, rapid, semi-haphazard planning.
(Spiders tear down their web everyday and build a new one. Networks
are more like cities, where the new one is built into/over the old.)
Yes, I agree with this -- near-constant, rapid, semi-haphazard
planning. But at this point, it isn't clear that we have a *lot* of
choice about that.
Additionally, it occurs to me that this current discussion should be
viewed - in part - as an attempt to avoid haphazardness. The easy way
forward is the blind way forward: "Oh well, out of ports, buy another
couple of cheap switches". What I'm hearing from people, though, is
that buying more capable switches will make it easier to do things
rationally going forward.
And as you've not used the managment interface,
you don't know if
can show the MAC's known on each port. (Which comes back to
people... do the admins know they can match up MAC addresses to tell
what's on/behind each port?)
My understanding is that the admins know that they *can't* do this
with the current switches. They could be mistaken. Can we confirm
this?
It seems that there are a lot of "would be nice" features, but that
the real "killer" here is the ability for the switch to tell us which
mac address is plugged in where, so that we can reconfigure vlans.
(And yes, I say this knowing full well that there's an alternative,
which is for Monkey Jimbo to go over there and document everything and
do all the rewiring himself and instruct the colo never to touch
anything. But realistically having an option that doesn't involve me
personally as a bottleneck is always a good idea...)
Large vendors (Cisco, et.al.) are much more likely to
donate gear to tax
deductable charities. Wiki isn't one, yet. I have suggested talking to
Cisco about getting some hardware donated -- cisco has alot of reclaimed
hardware (from trade-ups) and referbished goodies. I don't think anyone
would balk at paying for a support contract (2-3k$) for a donated 100k$
switch. It's a good tradeoff.
I have no objection to us trying to get gear donated to us. This will
be easier after the 501(c)(3) is confirmed by the IRS. But even then,
it will take time.
We need more ports *now*, so we should go with a sensible solution
that has a reasonable forward path.
--Jimbo