Problems - Category - Fryguy's Blog

Home Lab Cooling Option

Fryguy — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 13:00:35 +0000

How many of us have a home network rack in a closet someplace and leave the door open (or just off) to help keep things cool? Has your home lab been tucked away under the stairs so you don’t need to hear it? Or is it in the open so it stays cool and the noise drives you (or your other half) nuts? Well, let me tell you about what I am using to keep my home rack cool in a closet. For me, I have a bunch of Ubiquiti devices (future post), Synology NAS, Cable Modem, UPS’, and some Intel NUC servers in my home rack. I also have a decent amount of lab Cisco and Juniper gear that I spin up when necessary ( I use an APC managed PDU ). Overall it is fairly quiet, but I still wanted to keep it out of the eyes of others and also to keep the kids from touching anything. What I found is that when I closed the door, the temperature in the closet would rocket up and I would start to get temperature alarms from devices. That forced me to keep the door open, not an optimal solution for when guests are over.

Cisco Nexus Show Tech-Support – aka TAC-PAC

Fryguy — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:10:18 +0000

The inevitable TAC call and the request for a Show Tech to help with the support. Normally this is not a big problem on most systems, but if you ever try this on somehting like a Nexus 7000 – it takes a loooooong time and pulls well over 100 megs of information in that file. Capturing this output to a terminal is a test of patience (lets not mention console), or even if you redirect it to the bootflash it can still take some time. Then, there is getting a 100+ meg file copied from the bootflash to your computer, etc etc etc. I did do a quick post some time ago about using GZip to compress the file – you can find that post here.
But that is not what this post is about, this post is about a command called TAC-PAC. TAC-PAC seems to be a little known command to most people who have never run into a problem and had to pull a show tech of a N7K, of for that matter any NX-OS platform. I was able to confirm this command on Nexus 7000, 5000, and 1000 as well as the SAN MDS.
So, what is TAC-PAC? It is a single command that redirects the output of show tech-support details to a file, and then automatically compresses it for you. One command – nice and simple. The only thing that you will still have to do is pull the file via FTP or so.

Cisco 3750 Stack Member Recovery

Fryguy — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:28:57 +0000

Interesting day today, that it was. Well, I guess I should say that the weekend was interesting as we had some bad weather – and just by some random chance we lost a CoreWAN router and a Cisco 3750 Stack member. So lets just say that I spent my morning recovering the WAN router by moving the circuits to another router and recovering a 3750 switch. Since moving WAN circuits around is no big deal, lets talk about recovering a Cisco 3750 stack member switch. I will assume you have identified the switch that is dead – no lights is a good indication – and have received your replacement switch from Cisco already. The first thing you should do is independently boot the new switch and check the IOS version and make sure that it is either the same or compatible. For me, I prefer to make sure they are the same before adding a switch to the stack as I never trust “compatible” version of switch code. If you have ever upgraded a 3750 stack, you know it can take some time for the stack to come back – over 10 minutes is not unheard of. So what do you do if you lose a switch in your stack, and have the right replacement? Amazingly enough, just swap it out and the stack will work as normal. Now, don’t we always wish life was that simple!