Notes on the organization of DC3556

Shutdown procedure

There are many research groups using dc3556 that will need to be advised of any room shutdowns:

• Tetherless (Keshav)
• ExpNet (Karsten/Brecht)
• Shoshin (Black, Ward, Taylor)
• CERAS (Salem, Wong, Aboulnaga)
• Shiraz/Marroo clusters (Ilyas, Aboulnaga, Salem, others?)

Most of the groups will do their own shutdowns (Shoshin and ExpNet have IP-KVMs). Sometimes they will bring the systems to a halted state but not powered off.

For Keshav's servers:

• shutdown lightning, then all the snowballs. The snowballs aren't booted very often, so they will want to install updates at shutdown.
• shutdown sandstorm
• shutdown squall, then power off the disk shelf and tape robot
• shutdown other servers in any order. For PlanetLab, used ctrl-alt-del.

For Shiraz and Marroo, the UPSs are set up to power off the systems when a power failure occurs, so if we're lucky no intervention should be required.

Room layout

• The original layout plan for the room is shown in roomrack-layout.pdf
• Currently, see the MachineRoomMapping Tool, found at http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~tang/login.php.

Wiring labels

Communications rack (functioning as a wiring closet)

In dc3558, there is a set of "work-area" jacks labelled Lxx through Lyy which are directly connected to the "work-area" panel in dc3556 labelled A1 through An. There is a one-to-one correspondence between these that should not need to be changed. This information is not recorded anywhere, except on the jacks themselves.

The cables connected to the A1--An jacks in dc3556 provide connectivity to individual devices and to local unmanaged switches. Each end is to be labelled as follows:

1. they will have a "closet" label showing

• the name of the device in DC3556 to which the jack is connected
• the port number or other identifying mark on the device
• the A#

Additional labels may be attached identifying the subnet or the actual switch. These should never be treated as authoritative.

The cables connected to the Lxx-Lyy jacks in DC3558 will be labelled:

• the L#
• the switch name
• the port # on the switch

Intra-room cabling

There are some unmanaged switches in DC3556 to which end-user devices are connected. Cabling between the A# and the switch is described above (and is analogous to how we handle managed switches in genuine wiring closets). Between the switch and the end device (which could, in fact, be another switch) the cable is to be labelled using the "in-room" label standard:

• switch-name
• switch-port
• device-name
• device-port

Other information