Network Report February 2006

A lot has happened in the network over the last two months, and several long term projects have been completed.

Firstly all servers are now mounted on rails in a seperate rack. This means that the severs and network are physically seperate and secure rack.

During the move to the new rack two of our servers were replaced with new rack mountable machines:
* Toast - computerbank's gateway and proxy server
* Rusted - computerbank's new network/directory info server

In early Febuary all services on rusty were finally migrated to rusted, meaning we are now fully migrated to rack mounted machines, and fully migrated to Debian Sarge. This also takes us back to only four servers.

With the toast replacement two new features were added:
* The DSL now comes up on system boot, one of the big problems we had before
* An ad blocker has been installed, and no problems have yet been reported.

A remote management card was installed in carnivorous (our main file server) to allow for better systems management.

The Cisco 5500 switch has also been installed (by Rob), with full redundency in it, and 4 gigabit ethernet ports. Until we get Gigabit ethernet cards for the servers I plan to use EtherChannel to bond two 100Mbit connections for the speed boost.

Recently Rob has been able to clean up the patching in the network rack making it cleaner and easier to understand should problems arise.

A monitoring system has been installed on omnidimensional that tracks historical use of things like disk and the network. Still to monitor are:
       - System Temperatures (need kernel support)
       - Network backbone usage (will be done when the Cisco is fully configured)

A new phone system has been recieved, and when I get documentation on it (a request has been made, but not heard anything back yet) it will be installed, and all the phone wiring redone.

Thanks,
Julien Goodwin