Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Not the kind of puzzle I enjoy
The system admin on my floor went on leave again, leaving me in charge (only if something goes wrong). So sure enough - the admin gets on a plane Saturday night - and the whole server room goes down Sunday evening.
Our IT Support installed a new UPS for the room but it looks like they overloaded it - and down she went. So now I've got to figure out exactly where each piece of equipment plugs in - so I can only transfer the important parts of the load across to the UPS. Shouldn't be too difficult...
Except that it's a complete mess of cords that was haphazardly added to over the last 5 or so years. We have 5 racks of equipment - and 3 of them all trace back to the one powerboard plugged into the one extension cord. Trip over that cord - and lose three racks of network / servers.
So tomorrow I'm going to trace each power cord to the outlets - and try to get some of them organised. When there's 7 white extension cords all going down the back of a wall together - it gets a little difficult!
* Whinge *
The last time the admin went on leave was about two years ago. Sure enough - the day after that flight left - the server room went down. Back then I had no idea what I was doing - I guess I don't have much more of an idea now!
Our IT Support installed a new UPS for the room but it looks like they overloaded it - and down she went. So now I've got to figure out exactly where each piece of equipment plugs in - so I can only transfer the important parts of the load across to the UPS. Shouldn't be too difficult...
Except that it's a complete mess of cords that was haphazardly added to over the last 5 or so years. We have 5 racks of equipment - and 3 of them all trace back to the one powerboard plugged into the one extension cord. Trip over that cord - and lose three racks of network / servers.
So tomorrow I'm going to trace each power cord to the outlets - and try to get some of them organised. When there's 7 white extension cords all going down the back of a wall together - it gets a little difficult!
* Whinge *
The last time the admin went on leave was about two years ago. Sure enough - the day after that flight left - the server room went down. Back then I had no idea what I was doing - I guess I don't have much more of an idea now!
# posted by Joel Dixon @ 10:58 PM 
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that looks insane! good luck with sorting that out. maybe try attaching some coloured tape or some labels to help identify things if it happens again in the future.
Well - I'd finished with the mess last week - though it isn't really that much untangled. At least all of the important stuff has gone onto a UPS.
I'm with you Paddy - when I started working here I was always very interested in the Server Room - and how everything was fit together. But then I realised that our room was completely crap - a victim of Ad-Hoc designing!
So in terms of the right way to set one up - I haven't learned that yet! Personally - I think the best way to pick that kind of stuff up is from a grumpy Admin that's been doing it for 20 years. I had someone from another project helping with the work I had to do with the UPS - and he came up with many suggestions about how to do it right. Unfortunately we didn't have the right equipment - but at least we talked about it ;)
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I'm with you Paddy - when I started working here I was always very interested in the Server Room - and how everything was fit together. But then I realised that our room was completely crap - a victim of Ad-Hoc designing!
So in terms of the right way to set one up - I haven't learned that yet! Personally - I think the best way to pick that kind of stuff up is from a grumpy Admin that's been doing it for 20 years. I had someone from another project helping with the work I had to do with the UPS - and he came up with many suggestions about how to do it right. Unfortunately we didn't have the right equipment - but at least we talked about it ;)
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