[BBLISA] cisco port adapters to lend?

[Dean Anderson]

So it worked for an hour before shutdown?

What were the environmentals?  Did you repeat this?

		--Dean

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Alex wrote:

> > Suspecting this, and assuming it runs ok without port adapters, I'd guess
> > that you probably have a incompatible vxr card.  You should check the PA
> > cards that you have, and that they are all compatible with the VXR
> > backplane.  I can't recall a list, but some PA's are not compatible. But I
> > don't know what happens when those cards are put in the VXR...
> 
> I did as much research on that as I could before we bought the VXR.
> According to what I found, only one of our existing PAs wasn't VXR
> compatible (an older PA-8E), so I bought a PA-8E with a new enough
> firmware revision.  
> 
> As for what happens when one of those cards is put in a VXR:  I'd
> failed to tell my jr sysadmin about the PA-8E issue, so when we
> first swapped cards Friday night, we in fact put the older revision
> PA-8E in the VXR.  It did what you'd expect of Cisco gear: complained 
> with a useful error message:
> 
>    %PA-3-REVNOTSUPPORTED: PA in slot1 (Ethernet) requires base h/w revision 
>    of (1.14) for this chassis
> 
> We powered it down again and rebooted with the newer revision of 
> the card.  After that it was sucessfully in service for close to
> an hour, routing packets through all the PAs.
> 
> > Power supplies shutdown when they get too hot, or when there is excessive
> > current draw. You should beware of 'testing', by pulling cards, since
> > removing cards reduces load on the power supply, and gives more energy to
> > a shorting card, which could them damage either or both the card and the
> > backplane before the power supply shuts down.
> 
> Interesting, but all those same PAs are now in our old 7206 chassis,
> and we've seen no issues.  (To be clear, three of them were in the
> old chassis before; the only new (new to us; we bought it used) PA
> in the mix is the PA-8E.)  And our earlier no-load testing was two
> weeks with just the NPE, I/O card, and the PA-8E --- so by your
> argument, if any of those had a short, it should have caught fire
> then.  All of which seems to me to point back to a flakey power
> supply that fails under the power draw of four PAs.  If anyone
> has further insight or thinks I'm missing something, I'd sure 
> appreciate you telling me.
> 
> > On Sun, 8 Feb 2004 xela at terc.edu wrote:
> > 
> > > I know this is a long shot, but:  We had a cisco 7206-VXR go down
> > > about a half-hour after putting it in service the other day.  We
> > > suspect the power supply shut itself off under the load, and would
> > > like to test this theory without putting the router into service
> > > again.  The problem with this idea is that the port adapters that
> > > would be in it if it were under load are in the old 7206 routing
> > > packets, and we don't have spares.  So we have no way to test it
> > > under full power supply load except to put it in service --- unless
> > > perhaps some of you have port adapters sitting around that you're
> > > not using that you'd be willing to lend me for a week?
> > > 
> > > ---Alex
> > > 
> > > Carl Alexander
> > > Sr Systems & Network Administrator, TERC
>