Today was a rather crazy day at The Office. First were some email issues (I'm really beginning to dislike [DELETED-email-DELETED] sendmail [1], dovecot [2] and saslauth [3].
Then there were the network switches for a customer. Two 50 port Cisco switches (48 Ethernet and 2 gigabit Ethernet). The configuration was easy (trunked the two together via the gigabit Ethernet ports and four Ethernet ports for backup, a few ports VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network)ed for the public side of the network, and the rest under a separate VLAN for the private network)—it was the installation that was … troublesome.
We knew about the two 24 port switches we were replacing. We didn't know about the two cheap consumer grade switches behind a table and underneath a pile of CAT-5 cable.
So there was mounting of equipment on the wall. Ripping out of old network cables. Plugging in new network cables (we couldn't use the majority of the old cables as they were too short for our use). Tracing down some other cables. Swearing when we found the other two switches. The dangling power strip we ended up mounting on the wall. The table that fell apart and had to be reassembled.
The full installation took about four hours.
And as usual, we didn't plan on going to Denny's [4], but that's where we ended up.