Day 13: The Rack Move

Halverton built a new server room on the ground floor of HQ.

On Saturday, a contractor moved the rack there: SW-3F-SRV1 and the three servers.
He plugged every cable back in.

The same day, he added a second cable between SW-CORE1 and SW-CORE2.
The two cables work as one link, an EtherChannel called Port-channel 1.

On Monday you badge in at 7:10.
The wall is red.

Figure 1 – HQ, Monday 7:10

The Wall

Five lines at HQ.

Two are outages. Nobody reaches these servers:

• Finance server 10.20.12.10, down since Saturday 16:40

• DNS server 10.20.8.10 and CRM server 10.20.8.11, down since Saturday 16:52

Three are alerts. It still works, but the backup is gone:

• SW-3F-SRV1 is cabled to both cores, one link each. The link to SW-CORE1 is down. Everything goes through SW-CORE2.

• Port-channel 1, the EtherChannel between the two cores, is down.

• VLAN 12 has one gateway up instead of two.

Sarah, at 7:20:

"People start work at 8:30. Start with finance."

You have to clear the wall before 8:30.

You know three things.

1. How the rack was wired before the move.
Five cables on SW-3F-SRV1.

Three go to the servers.

• SRV-DNS on Gi0/1 and SRV-CRM on Gi0/2, both in VLAN 8.

• SRV-FINANCE on Gi0/4, in VLAN 12.

Two go to the cores.

• Gi0/24 to SW-CORE1.

• Gi0/23 to SW-CORE2.

Table 1 – SW-3F-SRV1 before the move

2. The audit rule.
The finance audit asked for two things.
The first one you did yourself, on R-WAN1: the Tulsa docks cannot reach the finance server (with ACLs).
The second is on the rack. Each server port accepts one MAC address, the address of its server. Any other address shuts the port.

3. The new link between the cores.
Gi1/0/2 and Gi1/0/3 on each side, in Port-channel 1. The EtherChannel is negotiated with LACP.

Figure 2 – The rack and the cores, as designed

The contractor's report says everything was plugged back as before.
The wall says it was not. Compare what the switches show you with what is written here.

Lab Instructions

You have the console on SW-CORE1, SW-CORE2, SW-3F-SRV1, SW-3F-ACC1, SW-WH1, R-HQ1 and on PC1, a desk on floor 3.
PC1 is 10.20.10.51.

• Clear the wall: two outages, three alerts

• Keep the audit rule: one MAC address per server port

• Save the configuration on every device you changed

Finish the lab, then type the flag below.

The wall is green at 8:25.

You write the report for Sarah.

She forwards it to the contractor.