It is rare that I actually get a chance to go and do some old school rack and stack work but after work today I was given my first chance in many years. The day itself was normal. In the office, blah blah blah. Work has become a bit boring, as I think might be obvious in my posts. It is pretty much the same thing, day in and day out. It’s fine, just nothing to talk about. I don’t go home and talk about work either. Very little ever happens at work these days.
Around a quarter to six I ran over and met Souder to begin the racking work for the evening. He was there maybe twenty minutes ahead of me. We looked at how much work there was to be done and realized that there is a ton more than we had originally anticipated and I had not managed to get any lunch today as I was just too busy so we ran over to Rockfish and grabbed dinner before starting work. It was a really nice evening so we sat outside on the patio while we got dinner.
We ate quickly and were back working on moving the equipment in no time. I had originally thought that we were just moving a server, plugging it in and taking off. Twenty minutes tops. Why oh why do I imagine that anything could go that way?
We had to reconfigure a rack, move tons of equipment that was in the way – including networking hardware with lots and lots of connections, a server and more. The big item was moving a large UPS which is never fun. We used wooden rails on the floor, a dolly, etc. When we plugged the UPS back in we had the excitement of it actually exploding! There were real flames a bit of the back of the unit actually hit me. Now that isn’t the type of excitement that you get every day.
It ended up taking all evening to get everything done. Of course, as with any simple little project, there was some huge disaster. That one tonight was the main server not being able to restart after the move! The motherboard appears to have partially died and we got stuck spending a lot of time trying to get that up and running again so that people could work in the morning. Fun.
We were quite exhausted when we finally got back to the house.