Reliability of Networking Hardware?

I had one older firewall device that I took the case off of and sat a fan next to it - later I did the right thing and removed the CPU fan, cleaned the CPU and heat-sink and then properly applied HSP to it - never needed the fan gain.

I do know what you mean though, some of those routers get quite hot.

Depends on the router. My Bay networks ASN has been chugging along just fine for about 10 years now....

On the other hand, I was ready to murder our Bay Accelar 1150 after

2-3 years -- and I'm sure that a jury of my peers would never have convicted me ;-)

To answer a bit to the question about whether the intermittant behaviour was due to lightning damage:

Not necessarily. ICs heat up and that causes wear on them. Boards expand and contract due to heat changes, weakening connections or pulling connectors out of sockets. Wires or solder connections may break or may oxidize (oxidization is faster at higher temperatures) increasing the resistance, which results in increased heat, which feeds back through. Capacitors (especially electrolytic) may burn out, sometimes quite dramatically. And not as dramatically, I've had a number of inductors burn out too. NVRAM can exceed its write-cycle limit. ICs can oxidize, but that is usually much slowed by the protective material... but oxygen can defuse through that. Impurities in ICs tend to migrate towards an anode or cathode. Cells in ICs that were marginal at manufacturing may fail in use.

As alluded to by some of the other posters, you want to keep your devices cool, and at a steady temperature (mechanical failures increase if the temperature varies.)

Hey Leythos, I don't have a drill press in the garage, and the two inch hole saw that I have is meant for wood. Can I just substitute taping a block of C4 to the router case and lighting the fuse? ;-)

Old guy

I don't have a 2" Hole Saw either, it's 4", which is a little large for this project, I only use the 4" Saw for 19" Rack Mount firewalls or servers, but on some servers it won't go all the way through - the saw is also only 4" deep, so if the server is thicker than 4" I can't make a hole all the way through - maybe someone will make a hole saw that works from both the top AND bottom so that the air flow isn't restricted by the direction that hole is cut. Now if I could just find a reverse cutting 180 Deg hole saw I might be able to get both sides and have better air flow :-)

On another note, I've also taken to using my 7mm Win Mag to drill holes in cases using solid bullets at a range of 100 yards, but it's hard sometimes, my kids don't always hold those routers still in the winter and that makes shoot holes through them a little difficult. What's really surprising is that the younger kids seem to be able to hold the target with less shaking than the older kids :)

Don't you use a pilot hole? I've got a 1/4 inch bit that is 18 inches long.

Pilot hole all the way through, hole saw in from both sides - piece of cake.

Small bore doesn't interest me that much. There's nothing like 70 grains of 4350 pushing 330 grains of jacketed lead out the front of a 1950s model 70. The .375 H&H is nice except when you try to bench-rest the sucker. That's waaaayyyyy to much recoil to take from the waist up. At the other end, a .378 round lead ball is about 80 grains, and I've used "indoor loads" of about 8 grains of 4759. Not overly noisy, and doesn't tear the hell out of the backstop.

You're not that far from Camp Perry, right? Most of the ranges around here don't like us centerfire crew. Somehow the "noise" of a .375 or .458 seems to distract the guys with their little stuff. Dunno why.

Old guy

Well, the problem is that my hole saw was only designed to work from one angle, so that means that if I cut from both sides that the air flow will rush IN from BOTH side and cause the case to expand as there is no exit hole. Now if I take the parts out of the case and cut from the inside out to the bottom, then the cut will allow air in the top and out the bottom - those dang directions hole saws :)

Yea, buy the frown on having my kids hold the router still what I shoot the air holes through it :)

Cheap UPS's provide blackout and extreme brownout protection.

Good ones, provide clean regulated power on their other side. These are often called "online" or "line-interactive" UPSs, meaning the power is always continually trimmed and boosted to be clean and stable on the far side, rather than "switching" or "standby" UPSs which simply kick in when the power exceeds a given threshold and kick out when it's within acceptable parameters.

Many people feel wonderfully secure with their standby UPSs when in fact their equipment is still vulnerable to power irregularities. If you've ever tried to run one of these from a generator, with it's very dirty output, you'll see the problems, on devices that are sensitive to such problems. Which is not all devices. The devices some people run will be fine on the tolerances of these type of UPS devices. But even if they can, on generator power the UPS will kick in and out all the time and eventually drain their own batteries trying to keep up, even if the equipment behind it can handle the resultant spikes/dips, which should all be within the parameters defined by the thresholds set by the device's dip switches. (provided it's doing it's job correctly -- some don't)

Whereas a good line-interactive UPS gives clean power to sensitive equipment even when fed dirty generator power. For example,

which I believe is the cheapest UPS in the APC line that has this feature, at $150.

Standby units from the same manufacturer start at about $40.

-Russ.