Cisco model 500 switches have limited RAM and only four, of twenty-four, PoE ports. Twice now I've tried to hang a small switch off the backside of model 7961 phones to attach multiple devices. Both times the 500 has cited a critical error and ceased to transmit traffic on the data VLAN, I suppose, to give deferrance to the voice data. The first incident involved a WAP and worked through one association, three devices including the phone. When the second association was made, supporting four devices, data traffic stopped cold. The more recent debacle involved a switch, PC and ATA. The phone, switch and PC worked; but the ATA connection, fourth device, melted the data.

The 500s don't support telnet, but force configuration via web page fed through a configuration port or a management interface (which must be set to the appropriate VLAN BTW!); so I don't know the exact settings of the Phone&Desktop p ports. The only option seems to be leaving the phone on it's proprietary port and running a second line from a switch configured port to support the other devices.

On a brighter note, the Cisco Learning Blog is a very helpful, well organized, conversational facility containing loads of information.

The first wave of phone envy has washed over the college. The victims, one department chair and our e-Learning director, insisted that they required "large" model 7961 phones. My boss wouldn't let me install them because I'd planned to "train" the recovering souls by stating that the features they were gaining were a slightly larger screen albeit a less useful interface, four alternate lines they wouldn't have assigned, and two additional buttons that shortened a few menu sequences by a single press.

There are no added features, compared to the "smaller" model, and the only real difference in the menus results in speed dialing requiring so many keypresses that one might as well dial the number manually. I've a real talent for sweetly informing people that their victory has actually downgraded their access and made their lives more difficult. So he's going to install their new phones while I hack at another analog converter to support someone's STATUS SYMBOL sorry I mean fax machine.

This project has been a blast. I've learned loads of Cisco programming and a bit more about human nature.

Presence has been working very well the past couple of patches if you discount the fact that the last patch is actually still the previous version because the latest didn't get past the employee login stage. But tonight Barnesworth's card kept lighting and dimming while I couldn't see him in FIND at all. So I IMd him and asked if he was logging in and out and his answer was "I haven't logged off since i logged on."

Well

Yes

Moving On

Online communities confuse me to no end. Personal responsiblity to moderate senseless squabbling in an online discussion, such as a "public" forum, would fall quickly into the "I don't care who started it or whose fault it is, you're both (all) in trouble" category. When people act like children, the only way to work effectively with them is to treat the entire offending group like children.

That applies to inworld griefers as well as trolls. Granted there are some professional stalkers insane enough to be criminally charged under real world laws; but the majority are simply childish. The average attention span is a few minutes at best granting adults the luxury of ignoring them, perhaps even just logging out long enough to drink a coffee, until the perps get bored and go away. Argument and retaliation does no better than to fuel their enjoyment and encourage their continued presence.

Now I would think that most people know this. Haven't we all worked with children at some point in our lives. I still teach three and four year olds to sing, together, one night a week. It reminds me a lot of forum particpation. Understanding that ninety-nine percent of our foul behavoiur is all in good sport, and par for the course, doesn't make it any less heartbreaking when someone takes it seriously and everyone else is either to stupid to back off and let it go, or too unfeeling to stop kicking a person when they're down.

A Cisco model 500 switch requires that the management interface be in vlan foo, the vlan that gateways to foo.1 even though the switchport, and it's associated port on the core stack both have to use native vlan 1. What seems odd then is that subsequent model 2950 switches must also be connected through ports assigned to vlan foo in order for traffic to flow. Then of course there's the problem of incompatible trunking in the older equipment so each vlan must be created manually.

It seems like every run from core to switches to [insert some combination of ATAs, PCs, Phones, Routers and more switches] requires that a unique configuration be hacked from point to point until everything decides that it's the first Tuesday of the month and finally time to connect.

By the way, I need a FAX^h^h^h STATUS SYMBOL. In fact I need two, one for each table. My office mate needs one too. Yes we share the space but we send and receive so many faxes each day that having three in the office might just cover our requirements. Gee won't everyone just be green with envy when they see them all lined up and shiney in our office!

Virtual Nature is still needing bloggers from Active Worlds, IMVU, Uru, Wow, and any other virtual environments where nature is represented by digital pixels and binary code. If you're interested in talking about how nature is, or isn't, integrated into online worlds, leave some comments or email me at eric@allison.net for an invitation to post articles.

You can already see from the entries that the terminology and definitions are open to broad interpretations so that everyone may feel comfortable participating in the discussions. Browse over and have a look, bring your friends! The more, the merrier!

Also please feel free to comment on the site itself. It's quite basic now so any suggestions are quite welcome.

Bellsouth migrated our incoming PRI today. It went very smoothly as we had already trained the users and tested the connections and features across the board. We did discover, after the fact, that Cisco model 1712 phones can only trunk our data vlan. Apparently they don't really "trunk" with multiple interfaces so that they can handle any number of streams. Ergo they won't relay voice data to a switch that has an ATA (analog tranceiver for faxes et al) attached.

Our options are to place powered switches at those locations, to actually trunk the vlans and service the little phones, or to replace the units with model 1761 phones which do actually trunk vlan information correctly. It's a small concern that affects three locations that people will have fax machines. They are status symbols after all. One person informed me last week that we needn't worry about connecting his to the system. It'll sit in the box until he has a real need for it, at least until we move into the new building (twelve to eighteen months) "just wanted to pick one up while we had money in the budget."

Oh My Stars

IP Routing makes me cry. How can something so straighforward become unnervingly complex overnight?

Now it makes sense to me that a switch must be in transparent mode when I want to just delete a few vlans from its local database. That's not the kind of mistake one makes twice in the same decade is it.

Switches operate in Server mode for management and broadcasting of vlan database entries, Client mode to be limited to only recieving vlan information, or Transparent mode to facilitate local management of vlans without affecting the rest of the fabric. When one trims vlans from a switch before migrating from Server to Transparent mode, one deletes all those vlans across the entire network.

Then one screams at the monitor, stomps the floor, throws a few useless items against the wall, drinks a mocha frappacino, browses a few blogs, recreates the vlans, drinks a mocha frappacino, answers all the voice mail blaming the "outage" on the phone company, drinks a mocha frappacino and takes the rest of the day off to avoid doing any more damage.

Slap my hand and call me potatoes. Portfast is a great feature but is a bad idea if the port is serving a trunk to another switch.