Cisco Catalyst Express 500 series switches review

I've been doing a new install with an nice new XServe and two of the CE 520G switches.

They've been a bit of a pain to be honest but once you know how to do things they're bargain.

First thing is change the smartport roles on every port. They default to server for some reason. So change them to desktop for desktops and other (blank) for anything like small switches, wireless APs etc. otherwise the port security will kick in and random stuff happens...

Server teaming is my biggest gripe. You need to set the ports to the server as switch ports (otherwise you can't set up the EtherChannel) and then setup the bond or team on the server but (big but) you also need to tag your VLAN 1 traffic. Given everything else in the universe has VLAN 1 as the native VLAN and is untagged this seems crazy.

I'm not a big fan of guis for things like switches, I like to see the config on a port and be able to debug everything under the sun. So I tend to try and push people to the "Classic" Cisco gear.

Once you know these gotchas though they're good bang for your buck and have Cisco's support which is the clincher.

VMWare server problems

This was an odd one. It may be vmware, it may be Gentoo or a combination..

VMware server wasn't working. So I tried reconfiguring from scratch but go this:

emerge vmware-server --config

Configuring pkg...

* Running /opt/vmware/server/bin/vmware-config.pl

Making sure services for VMware Server are stopped.

* WARNING: vmware is already stopped

Unable to stop services for VMware Server

Execution aborted.

Well yes, it's already stopped so why error when you're trying to stop it..duh...

Simple solution after some digging through the vmware-config.pl script..

./vmware-config.pl skip-stop-start

and I could configure it up again and we were away.

Office Mac 2008 service pack 1 install (SP1)

Microsoft are out to frustrate me again.

I'm building a machine for a customer and while trying to install Office 2008 I keep running into this problem.

The initial install goes OK which is version 12.0. Upgrading to SP1 installs about 8 or 12 K and says it's done but none of the apps are updated. I done the remove office and that doesn't clean out the /Library/Receipts folder of the 12.1 install so I pulled those out as well and started from scratch. Still no joy SP1 refuses to install. Any one else come across this? The machine is already up to 10.5.8 to maybe that is too high for SP1.

I've sent office back and we're using OpenOffice for the moment. It's a standby machine and only gets used occasionally but it would be nice to get it sorted. Or maybe I'm missing the jab by karma to move to OpenOffice :-)

5 minutes later...

Typical you always notice something after posting. Clear out the /private/tmp folder of anything to do with the SP1 update and it works. There was Office2008_en_quit_12.1.0.combo.pkg.somehash and com.microsoft.updater/ in mine.