HP know how to ring in the new term
The first full school day after Easter is always a fun experience.
What is less fun is running around the school with emergency swap-in equipment after a two-month-old HP Procurve 2650 decides to lock up inexplicably and leave an entire building without IP connectivity.
I was… unamused.
4 responses to “HP know how to ring in the new term”
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The Angry Technician 
That’s a bit weird, we’ve just gone through upgrading our whole network to HP ProCurves, and we’ve had zero issues with the kit. Compared to the unmanaged rubbish we had, it is so much better now.
AFAIK, the 2650’s were discontinued some time ago, replaced by the 2610 series, which is what we have. Oh well, guess such things can and do happen. Cross fingers it never happens to us.
At first the problem went away after a couple of power cycles, but it recurred less than 30 minutes later. I’ve patched the building cabling and the incoming fibre over to the emergency equipment, then upgraded the firmware on the ropey switch and left it plugged in to a spare port to see if it stays upright overnight. If it does, I’ll start patching the workstations back over in batches and see what happens.
At least they still have a lifetime warranty.
This is very true, though it’s only really useful if you can reliably reproduce the problem to provide HP support with something to go on. At the moment I can only reproduce it randomly in a production environment, which isn’t very helpful to the users. I suspect it has something to do with the load it deals with when in service, and I don’t have 40+ test workstations to plug into every port and let run for an hour…