What not to do with a Catalyst 2948G
After years of service in a larger computer lab, a Cisco Catalyst 2948G was retired and placed in the service of the building's tech staff.
It was set up, along with a NetScreen 5 GT firewall at the techs' desk in order to service our multitudes of computers. We quickly noticed, however, that the thing made a lot of noise. It had 5 NMB 2410ML 5300rpm fans, each at 35dBA.
This would never do. So, I went to the sysadmin, and mentioned 'Vantec Stealth'.
Now, this thing is out of warranty, but the university has a blanket contract that covers most anything that could happen to it for a very long time. Modifying it in any way would take it out of that contract [I confirmed this with Cisco]. "Send me a link," he says.
We purchased 5 Vantec Stealth SF6025Ls to replace the NMBs. Each fan weighing in at 2600rpm and 20dBA. Replacing them wasn't as easy as I'd hoped.
The original fans had a two prong connector, but not a standard one. I almost just slipped the 3 prong on so red and black were connected, but that was the easy way out. It would have also forced me to install the fans backwards, because the original plugs were reversed.
So, I decided to pull the connectors off of the originals, and place them onto the new fans. My hands got a little cut up [don't try pulling those things off with your bare hands], but I eventually got all of the connectors on there.
It all went back together with, surprisingly, no glitches. It powered up, and everybody was amazed that it was even on [because it was so quiet, not because I managed to get it back together in one piece].
