Many people are happy to lay back and relax on the day after Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. Many are more motivated to go shopping. Some of us, go to work.
After requesting, for more than three years at my facility, some total network and server downtime, I finally got it today. I hope that my coworkers are enjoying their time off. I made it impossible for anyone to do anything that required much more than being able to log onto their work computer, if they could even do that.
As ever, with many projects, they take at least as long as you comfortably expect they will and often take much longer than your wildest expectations. All I wanted to do was swap out four or five switches in the rack, install GBIC’s in the new switches, clean up the the patch cabling for the 200 or so data and voice runs, test connectivity, and leave around 1600.
That did not happen. It was an eleven hour ball buster but I am comfortable with it as it is for the moment. I didn’t get some of the second NIC and the ILO port connected. I never even touched the voice rack. I think that the data side looks pretty good. I have shut down five switch stacks in the last week. I have more switches than I know what to do with…that’s a change!
Here is some evidence of switch clean up.
Before:
Between:
After:
