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Month: February 2014

Using IPMI Serial-over-LAN for server consoles

Using IPMI Serial-over-LAN for server consoles

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I’ve been trying to learn linux networking and virtualisation using a donated server in a remote lab. The server didn’t have an IP-KVM attached but it did have a working IPMI connection. Not that I’d need it of course; I was experimenting with network settings whilst ssh’d into a server that was four and a half thousand miles away. What’s the worst that could happen? Of course the inevitable happened and I haplessly disabled my eth0 interface. I was locked…

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Is CPU or ASIC responsible for forwarding?

Is CPU or ASIC responsible for forwarding?

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I received the question below from reader Ned as a comment on my 24-port ASIC post and thought that the discussion was worth a post of it’s own. …Would you be able to speak a bit about the actual physical path or packet flow a packet takes inside the switch itself and how does the hardware forwarding take place within the switch and asic. When does packet get sent to the Asic. Is it happen on ingress or on egress? When…

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Hardware – What’s the ‘holdup’?

Hardware – What’s the ‘holdup’?

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This post discusses power supply ‘holdup’, and how it can impact network or server hardware uptime. The holdup time or ‘output holdup time’ is the length of time that a given power supply can maintain output power to the switch or server after it’s input power supply has been cut. The dependent host will shut down if the power supply isn’t restored to the PSU before the hold-up time expires. I like to think of holdup time as a power…

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Planning projects instead of burning benjamins

Planning projects instead of burning benjamins

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Engineers are often unstuck by poor planning and get hit with large financial penalties as a result. Projects can become mired in delays and complications due to unforeseen costs and expenses. There are some unavoidable bumps in the road, but most could be foreseen and eliminated in advance. I want to share a few tips based on some experiences I’ve had over the years.

Hardware – Equalization and Pre-emphasis

Hardware – Equalization and Pre-emphasis

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Before we look at equalization and pre-emphasis, we should examine some fundamentals of waves and signals. A perfect square wave is a really useful way of representing a waveform in the time-domain, but it’s not the only way of looking at the signal.The name ‘time-domain’ may be new but the view is familiar to us all, you have amplitude on the vertical axis and time you have time on the horizontal scale. Ideal square waves need infinite bandwidth The square wave…

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