[BBLISA] cisco port adapters to lend?

[Alex]

> 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