jfw.id.au

We’re currently going through a bit of an upgrade of the Oracle database server that have at work at the moment. We’ve purchased new hardware, which has been mounted into the shiny new rack and we are now up to the connecting, configuring and installing stage.

We’ve gone for a fairly modest 2 server Oracle RAC cluster. This gives us the additional power and disks that we need now and the smothes upgrade path in the future when we need more power.

The hicup on the network came about when we were connecting the new servers into the main switch. Our main switch is a nice little 1U, 48 port device and we appeared to only have 1 spare port on it. After a fair amount of cable chasing we managed to find a couple of unused ports. Unfortunately we also managed to slightly dislodge the network cable for the server that is responsible for DHCP on the office LAN.

All up, things were probably offline for about 10 minutes tops before we a: heard about it, and b: fixed it up. Not exactly a great acheivement, but amusing enough. The image below should give a clear indication of the mess that is the main patch panel and switch at the moment.