It's the Switches That'll Gitchas

These were very nearly emails. You're welcome.

Sat 7/18:
I think I am making a huge mistake using enterprise switches. The heat coming off that thing has been a real problem! I was just sitting there dripping with that office over 90F. I could swap it for a 24-port Netgear but I don't wnat to lose the serial and logs and stuff I use. It's just like web gui only which isn't great for me.

I'm pretty sure that switch is "THE" source of excess heat in this room.

Sun 7 /19:
Netgear on my desk: <15W max.
Cisco: Two 1100W supplies. As I read it from sh stack-power it looks like it's using ~239 watts right now (Alloc Pwr). 15w of that is PoE which is powering an 8 port netgear

But that's also the kind of shit I like to be able to just ssh over there and look at from my couch watching Lionel Richie videos.

While I have a lifetime supply of Cisco switches in terms of how long I'd expect each to last me with my current workload I've gotta recognize that some stuff is just going to decay and stop working. My workload does not justify the power draw at this point really.

Even though there are two power supplies they are hitting the same 15A household circuit. One power strip goes straight into the wall and one goes into a UPS. That's very handy for things like performing battery maintenance on the UPS for instance.

Mon 7/20:
Yeah screw this. At Eversource's current rate of .17/kwh I think that Cisco is costing me $31/month to run, vs $1 for something like that NetGear.

Before I just pop for exactly that same model I'm going to research and see if I can't at least get some features (JTAG/Serial), CLI, SNMP for my Cacti monitoring. Syslog.

I don't mind spending $200 I don't have on a solution that will make that amount back in like 6 months. If I can spend a little more and get something a little more enterprisey I'll take it.