Flashes of Panic

The office network will be down from about 5:00 to 5:30 this afternoon while I install a new switch in the basement. Both our internet-facing servers (Bluebird and Cuckoo) will continue to accept connections from outside, but desktop PCs will not be able to reach servers, printers, or the Internet.

Time planned for minimum after-hours time for me, and minimum inconvenience for normal co-workers. Stakhanovites can wait a few minutes for their network.

The new switch will be a significant improvement to the office network, increasing the speed of most network segments and significantly reducing the routing load on Bluebird.

Most of you won't notice the difference unless you are moving large files between servers, but our current network is so noisy it's giving our gateway server fits.

If everything goes smoothly, the actual downtime will be significantly less than half an hour. If nothing goes smoothly, we'll try again at another time.

If it doesn't work when I plug it in, I will only futz with it until 5:30 before giving up and plugging the old hardware back in. I'll be a bit stunned if it is really this easy.

If you have any questions or concerns, let me know.

Please don't tell me I need to reschedule so you can stay late and work on this file that lives on one of the servers.

The big blue switch goes in this afternoon—small networking on about as large a scale as it gets without becoming large networking.

[Update: It's in, it works, my posting packets are flowing through it. In the time estimate, I should have considered the time required to unplug forty-eight Cat-5 cables from the old hubs, and plug them back in to the new switch... everything went smoothly, yet it still took half an hour. Now I need to put a terminal program on one of the laptops so I can patch in to the console port and figure out how to manage it.]