Life of a Sysadmin

The occassional trials and tribulations of a jack of all tr ades sysadmin in a startup in Silicon Valley

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October 2008 (2)
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June 2008 (1)
April 2008 (1)
March 2008 (6)
December 2007 (6)
October 2007 (1)
September 2007 (1)
August 2007 (2)
July 2007 (1)
June 2007 (5)
May 2007 (5)
April 2007 (3)
March 2007 (7)
February 2007 (2)
January 2007 (3)
December 2006 (4)
November 2006 (3)
October 2006 (3)
August 2006 (3)
July 2006 (1)
June 2006 (2)
May 2006 (4)
April 2006 (2)
March 2006 (5)
February 2006 (5)
January 2006 (7)
December 2005 (2)
November 2005 (6)
October 2005 (4)
September 2005 (4)
August 2005 (1)
July 2005 (2)
June 2005 (3)
May 2005 (4)
April 2005 (1)
March 2005 (2)

June 2007

Sysadmins Law 7, or Never scrimp on the interconnects for high speed devices

While getting our new tape jukebox working, I was running into all sorts of seemingly random and odd behaviors. The new jukebox (run by WinCE) couldn't consistenty recognize all of it's drives. On boot, the server did not always find all of the devices connected. Tapes would show up as unreadable in some drives some of the time. General oddness all around.

I checked the cabling, the scsi id's, and the termination. Everything was as it should be. I even added up the various lengths of cable to make sure I was within spec for total cable length. Through a tedious process of elimination, I was left with a seemingly bad cable. Which lead me to sysadmins Law 7;