Weirdness solved; A dumb request.

Solved the networking weirdness that had befallen some of our servers since upgrading our networking infrastructure. We'd implemented HP's LACP solution,understanding that it would work with the HP server NIC teaming thing to give us a really high-speed, fully teamed solution. Apparently not, for some reason. The 802.whatever that the NICs would have been picking up automatically - the team type being set to auto - just doesn't seem to work reliably.

So I broke the teams on the problem boxes, then set the trunk type on the switch to "trunk" instead of LACP - you can trunk two different ports on two different cards within the chassis, giving you redundancy - then recreated the teams to NLB with Fault Tolerance, then unchecked the TCP onloading box, which seems, from reading around, to be giving loads of people shit. It's apparently corrected in the latest NIC drivers, but just to be sure, you know. Problem gone, performance not quite as good, theoretically, but there's so many other throttles right now I can't tell. So that's good.

What's not good, however, is a reputable database provider asking us to add an entire class B network to our firewall ACL, then another class C network. That's right. Dear gullible fool, please open 65000+ addresses to your ACL list. The reply was neccesarily short and to the point, as you'd expect...