On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 2:26 PM, Luke S. Crawford <[email protected]> wrote: > > I've been mounting switches backwards forever; I mean, the ports are on > the back of the servers, right? it only makes sense. Now, normally, > I put it at the top of the rack and it works fine; excess heat gets > sucked out through the fan at the top of the rack. > > Well, in my most recent racks, I decided to be clever and mount it in the > middle. Less cable travel for everyone, right? > > The idea turned out less brilliant than planned. I mounted a server > above it that was already, ah, iffy heat wise, and as soon as it was > loaded, it crashed, I believe due to thermal stress. > > So my thought is to just mount some powerful fans opposite the switch[1], > pushing the hot air out the front of the rack. I mean, it would warm > the intake of the servers above, but most of my servers are not thermally > iffy, and the data center is reliably cold, so that seems to be less of > an evil than dumping all the heat into the server immediately above > through the bottom of the case. (though, I suppose, that is also an option; > I have some massively overcooled 3u chassis that could take that heat > and a lot more and dissipate it before anything unpleasant happened. > Heck, I should put the 'thermally iffy' server in a new case anyhow, > and that wind tunnel sounds like just the thing;) > > [1]perhaps something like this: > http://www.amazon.com/Tripp-Lite-SmartRack-Rack-fan/dp/B001DW8J5M
I wouldn't consider this backward, but the correct way. If the fans in the switch are blowing the wrong way, that's a design mistake made by whoever built the switch. The problem here is the server that's crashing. If it crashed immediately then it was already far too close to thermal failure and you need to address that. I'd remove the CPU coolers, clean them off, then remount with some fresh thermal compound. Clean out any dust in the fans, make sure all fans are working, etc... -☙ Brian Mathis ❧- _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
