[tech] Hydra has been replaced by cthulhu

[Grahame Bowland]

Hi all

A quick update. Today hydra was replaced with a Accelar 1100B, namely
cthulhu.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au. The switch can be configured via telnet, SNMP
and using the "dmgr" utility installed on cybium. This utility is quite
unstable under windows 2000, so I'd suggest someone get a Win98 laptop
or something to run it on.

To run it;
  c:
  cd c:\dm
  c:\dm\bin\wish42 dmgr.tcl

Password "uccpub" for read only, old root password for write community.

There is a vlan trunk running into hydra; it is now running on
130.95.13.4 and 130.95.13.66 respectively. Whether it comes back or not
after reboot has not been tested; it should do but please, be around to
check if it doesn't...

Many, many duplex issues were discovered, which have mostly been fixed.
Here is Grahame's Helpful Guide to Duplex Negotiation:

 1. if remote host is an unmanaged switch or a server, always true
autonegotiation first. if you turn autonegotiation off, many switches
will default to 100/half.
 2. if that doesn't work, try forcing to 100/full.
 3. if that doesn't work, curse and set your end to 100/half too.

Most of the little switches were at 100/half when we were forced
100/full (left over config from when the thing was at UCS) so that
needed fixing. This caused the initial (dismal) results of perfomance
testing - we are now seeing >10MB/sec between subnets (vlans).

*under no circumstances turn the webserver on* It is buggy, and code red
causes the switch to slow down / lock up. This is a known problem,
possibly fixed with later code - we should probably get some from
somewhere. But there is no reason to turn it on.

Play with the switch, but please, please don't do something awful to it
so we can't telnet in. The serial is a PITA :)

Guild network upgrade status; fibre is in, change-over to 100Mb will
hopefully happen tomorrow or the day after. At which point, connectivity
to UWA should get massively faster.

Thanks in particular should go to James, for running around madly fixing
duplex problems :-)

-- 
Grahame Bowland                                   doth safely trust in
<grahame at angrygoats.net>                   her so that he could not be
                                                     eaten they are so