Double the Fun

I couldn’t help myself. I picked up a second SX1024 switch.

Why you ask? Redundancy, or better yet… a spare. Everything has a usable life, and if the switch fails, I want to be able to get back up and running as quickly as possible. I’m not expecting it to fail (it’s built like a battleship) but it is 13-ish years old and if I wait until an actual failure I might not be able to get a replacement SX1024 at any price which would leave me having to source something different. And then there is the whole configuration issue, possibly on a platform I’m not familiar with. All of the possible scenarios equate to a long downtime, which as mentioned, I’m trying to avoid. ¹

So, I picked up a second switch at what I consider a bargain basement price of about 60% what I paid for the first one. I’ve already updated it from version 3.6.4006 up to 3.6.8012 and once the network is completely configured, I’ll copy the configuration over to the second switch and stick it on a shelf hoping that I never have to use it, but confident that I have a relatively cheap backup solution. OR since the configuration is fairly generic I could put it to use for misc testing until it’s ever needed.

The initial connection went as expected.

The update procedure had a hiccup in that I needed to find a new intermediate version 3.6.5000, and the path would be 3.6.4006 -> 3.6.5000 -> 3.6.6106 -> 3.6.8012. However, I was not able to locate 3.6.5000 nor was I able to find any other clean path to the present version. I decided to go with 3.6.4006 -> 3.6.5009 -> 3.6.6106 -> 3.6.8012 thinking that any discrepancies or issues would either be edge cases that I’m not going to need or would be cleared up with the two subsequent iterations of updates. Once completed, everything appears to be ok.

Thanks for reading. As always, comments and questions are welcome.