So at work lately I’ve been getting all sorts of cool stuff because of our main office moving into a new building and our surgical center expanding into a full-fledge hospital.

At the main office, we purchased a couple Cisco Catalyst Express 500 switches to replace aging Intel and Cisco switches. Nothing fancy with these switches… just 24-port switches with 2 gigabit uplink ports, and 4 of the ports on one switch are Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) ports, so our two wireless access points don’t need big honking power bricks.

A quick note about this switch model… DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DO THE INITIAL CONFIGURATION FROM A WINDOWS VISTA / WINDOWS 7 / WINDOWS SERVER 2008 system… it most likely won’t work and will refuse to give you a valid “setup” connection. You must use a PC with Windows 2000 or Windows XP on it. I don’t really know why that is, and it’s pretty stupid, but there you have it. Once the initial configuration is done though, you can access the web config pages just fine using those versions. Here’s a partial shot of it sitting on my TV tray at home tonight:

At the hospital, I have been busy installing equipment into our new rack in the server closet. This includes two HP ProLiant DL380 G5 servers, a Tripp Lite KVM switch, and a Cisco Catalyst 3750G network switch. The servers were a piece of cake to setup since that’s what I do best, and the KVM just makes accessing those servers really easy, but the 3750G switch is another story. It’s going to take a lot of effort to revamp my network infrastructure over there, so next week is going to be very busy and involve a bunch of late nights. Here’s some shots of the equipment:

Of course, if you’re not paying attention, in a hurry, exhausted, living in Australia, and/or just plain stupid for a few minutes, this is what can happen:

Anyway, I definitely recommend any of this equipment to IT people needing good solutions.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 10:35 PM and is filed under Tech News.