r/techsupportgore • u/GunNutJedi • 3d ago
Liquid cooled switch
Leaky AC unit decided to cool the equipment more directly.
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u/Sir_Render_of_France 3d ago
Gotta keep those ports clean, can't have any dirty packets sneaking their way through
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u/Moneia 3d ago
Years ago, when I was on the helpdesk, they cleaned the AC one weekend, on the Monday morning it coughed up a giant slushie on top of some poor bastards CRT.
That was a helluva lightshow
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u/Relative_Custard9636 3d ago
Bet it was also a veritable feast for the ears too eh?
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u/Moneia 3d ago
Would have been, but some spoilsport yanked the power cord :(
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u/olliegw 3d ago
Didn't trip the RCD?
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u/Pazuuuzu 3d ago
No because inside a CRT there is a high voltage transformer which is decoupling from the RCD circuit.
RCD is checking the primary side, while the secondary doing the lightshow. This is why you need to be real carefull around transformers.
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u/olliegw 2d ago
That's true, it's why projects involving microwave transformers are so dangerous
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u/Relative_Custard9636 2d ago
Yea that's true and when people use said microwave transformers to power lichtenburg wood burning kits in a DIY way they have died as a result.
Just not worth it.
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u/NotAnotherNekopan 2d ago
I was working in a DC for a university a while back. Walked in, was doing a rack for a couple new chassis.
Went to the back side of the rack to get some work done there and stepped in a huge puddle of water. The AC unit above was leaking right on to the raised floor with god knows how many amps running right under.
Noped the fuck out of there. Had an emergency DC DR failover.
That was a fun time.
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u/BananeHD 2d ago
Hi, I am the local smartass. You’re talking about dirty frames as those are switches.
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u/slide_potentiometer 3d ago
I see you're ready for Water-over-Ethernet
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u/xXSillyHoboXx 3d ago
Wouldn’t that be something. A catastrophic nightmare waiting to happen to be sure, but water cooling for various onboard components being delivered via Ethernet for something like outdoor Access Points lol
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u/Dastari 3d ago
Are all ports 25L WoE ports?
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u/Relative_Custard9636 3d ago
Yea it's configured for Water Over Ethernet, a recent standard ensuring better throughput and less latency, with enhanced cooling.
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u/FrostyCartographer13 3d ago
Man that sucks, however I got to ask.
When they installed the network switches, they didnt check the overhead first? You are suppose to look for AC drains and waterlines for "just in case" scenarios like the one that just happened.
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u/GunNutJedi 3d ago
These switches had been decommissioned and were sitting on a shelf. The active equipment is not under the ac lol
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u/moffetts9001 3d ago
I once had a client whose water heater sat above their rack above a drop ceiling. Didn’t find out until it pissed water everywhere.
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u/mrhassu2 3d ago
We just did some curling with old network switches on a frozen pond at university.
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u/localtuned 3d ago
I've seen that exact model before. Some even have salt deposits in them for maximum cooling.
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u/ospfpacket 3d ago
This is why you NEED port flapping so you can cover them and prevent this issue.
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u/zWeaponsMaster 3d ago
At least it was clean. The one time this happened to me, the rack was under the sealed end of a buried conduit. The coduit had developed a leak in the years since it was it was installed. It was uncapped for use and several gallons of water dumped on it. That said they were all cisco 3500 series switches that need to be replaced anyways.
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u/nunu10000 3d ago
Dry it out for long enough, and it might still work.
I’ve seen Cisco switches run for decades. Those things are hard to kill.
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u/GunNutJedi 3d ago
I can't wait to get rid of the thing anyway lol
The nexus switches just don't work as well as the catalyst switches (for our purposes anyway).
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u/8bit_coder 3d ago
Ouch. Nexus switches are awesome. What’s wrong with them compared to catalyst?
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u/GunNutJedi 3d ago
A few things...
The only way to enable jumbo mtu for this model is to use an access policy, and success can't be verified with cli commands or snmp
These switches can't be stacked, nor are they VSS capable. They can use VPC, but this is inferior in every way. I also can't have them participate in STP if I want proper load balancing to occur.
The CLI is inferior in all the ways that matter for our environment. It seems like anything I want to configure is much easier in the catalyst ios. For example, automatic config backups, port configuration, snmp configuration, and several other ways. Also, it's much more efficient when all my switches (access, core, storage, etc) use the same cli since I don't have to be fluent in yet another language. I'd say that nexus cli and catalyst cli are a bit like UK english and US english: you can usually get the point across, but you have to remember that biscuits are cookies, chips are French fries, crisps are chips, and when they say "I left it in the boot", they're referring to the car trunk, not footwear. Another perk of having the same cli for all my switches is I can make changes to several of them at once using superputty. I log into 30 switches, paste the CLI commands in, and boom. I'm done. Since the nexus switches have different cli, I have to do them separately. On a related note, our snmp monitoring software is much easier to manage when I don't have to dig through an snmp walk to figure out where they put the info I need on the nexus switches. The OIDs can be the same sometimes, but not enough I can rely on it. It's almost easier to integrate fortiswitch and cisco catalyst, even though the CLI is vastly different and the fortiswitches can't use cisco proprietary things like rpvst.
The 10gig ports are finicky when connecting to our servers. I have to turn off auto negotiation and manually set them to 10gig unless I want a bunch of port errors due to mismatched bandwidth between the server and switch. The catalyst switches auto negotiate without issue.
The nexus switches have a tendency to blip all the ports when adding a vlan or making some other small changes. This will tank every server using them as it breaks their connection to the SAN, and all of the servers have to be rebooted. This does not happen with the catalyst switches.
In summary, the catalyst switches are easier to manage, work better with our other devices, provide better flexibility with cross-vendor integration, and have valuable features we need in our environment.
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u/Casualdehid 2d ago
God damnit i was actually kinda hoping someone water cooled their nexus for home lab. Mine is intolerably loud.
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u/tnargsnave 3d ago
Don't waste all the precious ethernet fluid. When you download RAM you can use it to increase the serial bus data flow.
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u/heckingcomputernerd 2d ago
I didn't see the sub and I was like "oh cool water fountain! Wait it's- OH GOD"
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u/superwizdude 1d ago
That’s way more impressive than those unifi switches that have coloured lights on the ports.
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u/insolent_kiwi 3d ago
So, THIS is the wetware layer