Posts by wabbit347 20 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jan 2009
A tiny magnet can hold a paperclip off the ground, so the entire mass of the earth doesn't exert enough gravitational force to overcome the force that the magnet is exerting on the paperclip. That's how weak gravity is compared with the electromagnetic force.
EDIT: Boffin icon in honour of clever people doing science.
If it was me, I'd be going with the Nexus 3000s.
If you want single point of management, perhaps it might be worth looking at the Cisco 5548s or 56xx range of switches combined with a pair of 2248 FEXes. This would give you 10G and 100M/1G ports with a single management console, although the FEXes don't appear to have PoE so may not be suitable for end users needing VoIP phones for example.
If you can get refurbed Cisco gear, you can get some considerable savings even on relatively new Cisco kit (hence me mentioning the Nexus 5000s). I guess it depends if Smartnet is critical or whether you can use a third party support company.
AFAIK the Catalyst switches are still going, so a venerable 4900 or something 4500-ish would give you 10G ports (and VSS with 2 of them for hardware resiliency) Can't comment on costs though.
For vendors other than Cisco, I'd be giving whiteboxes running Cumulus a serious look. If you're familiar with Linux, then these might be a viable option, I'd have thought with a bit of puppet/chef/ansible that management overheads could be reduced. They also now have a VM for download so you can at least evaluate/test at a minimal cost.
The problem following on from bidding for tiny subnets will be the increased size of the IPv4 routing tables as what was previously a /20 gets returned and re-allocated as 16 /24s. Multiply that by a few thousand times and the 512k router-pocalypse of a couple of months ago will be a daily occurrence.
Hopefully an actual milestone that even a finance person can understand might be enough to get IPv6 takeup moving a bit more...
Icon: Beer (BeerV6 in 128 pint barrels of course)
Surely in this brave new cloudy world all your employees are scattered across the hipstersphere. They should all be in various coffee shops sipping skinny lattes and spaffing confidential data across the wi-fi on their BYODs. So unless a JCB goes through the whole of Shoreditch simultaneously, it's not a problem. Plus Finance will moan about the costs of second lines so you won't get one.
Bitter? Moi?
A very cool project.
Reminds me a bit of "The Elements of Computing Systems" , although the book used software emulators so you don't need so much physical space. Enough to get started on the principles of CPU design though.
(not associated in any way with this, just an interested reader that bought the book)
Funnily enough, I was at Infosec yesterday and watched a demo involving an internet enabled kettle. The demonstrators setup a rogue Wireless network with same SSID as the one the kettle's connected to, but at a much higher gain. They sent a spoof packet to force the kettle to disassociate itself from the good network, it then reconnected to the rogue network with the higher broadcast power (which is unencrypted). Telnet to kettle, issue some Hayes modem style AT commands and voila! WPA2 key available, stored on kettle in plain text...
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