If you attempt to do anything described in this post, it is at your own risk. Please don't electrocute yourself, and be aware you'll be voiding your warranty.


Noisy new piece of networking kit

This, as many readers will know, is a switch. You stuff cables into it and it connects together the devices on the other end of them (laptops, PCs, printers, WiFi access points, cameras, ...) to form a network.

This particular one is destined to take over at St Columba's, where it's replacing an older model which I salvaged from a skip in 2012 - so it doesn't owe us much. The nice thing about this new one is that it supports Power over Ethernet (PoE). This is exactly what it sounds like - the switch sends power down the network cable to the device at the other end, which is handy in our case, because the WiFi access points are both high up on walls/ceilings and nowhere near power sockets.

At the moment, we use PoE injectors, which means that in the cabinet with the existing switch there are extra power bricks, cables, etc - messy, and very demanding on the number of wall sockets. All that should get cleaned up now, but there was a problem...

I fired the new switch up on my desk at home to configure it, and was immediately disappointed by the amount of noise it made.

OK, so much rack-mount IT kit is a lot worse. But since this thing is supplied with rubber feet for desktop use as well as the rack-mount kit, I was rather hoping it would be quieter.

In a perfect world, this wouldn't matter: all the cabling in the church would terminate in the basement or another room nobody ever goes in, so a few fans wouldn't be an issue. Meanwhile back in the real world, it's all under the desk in our minister's vestry. So even this level of fan noise would present a problem for some users of the room.

I'm not the only person to take issue with this; Google found various suggestions including a YouTube video by a fellow Brit who wired some extra resistors in to reduce the speed of the fan, and hence the noise, in a similar model. I might try that, but for now I've indulged in the dubious fix of disconnecting the fan. The switch is rated for operation in temperatures of up to 50 degrees - not usually seen in Britain - and since fewer than half the ports, and less than half of the PoE budget will be in use, I'm going to chance it.

This upgrade also paves the way for some other PoE devices, specifically door lock controllers. I'll write about those as and when the project goes ahead...