I shuttled a replacement server up to Vancouver yesterday. Our old DNS server “willow” finally died. Since I live halfway there I drove it up. Everything went well except for two things.
#1: I can’t find my keycard for the Peer1 facility.
No big deal, I call the NOC and a guy comes down to let me in. I walk around from the door I usually go in on the east side of the building down to the loading dock on the north side. Of course I am carrying this 40lb server. Ugh. Not good for my just barely healed back. Then the Peer1 NOC guy locks us out of the loading dock, so we trudge up the loading dock ramps, and around to the SE corner of the building… uphill all the way. My back was really hurting and by the time we got to the elevator inside the building lobby the Peer1 NOC guy must have noted the pain on my face and volunteered to carry the server for a while. We arrive in the datacenter and I’m still in my “work clothes” and a gore-tex jacket. It is HOT in the DC. I hand him the server back (we had swapped again as he unlocked doors) and stripped off the jacket. Thankfully our little server enclosure (a wire mesh “hockey locker”) has an HVAC vent right above it so while I’m working I have cold air blowing on me.
#2: The damn server doesn’t fit in the enclosure!
This trend of making servers 1U high and as long as an aircraft carrier is just completely out of control. This box is a Dell server, and it is about 1″ deeper than the rack it is in. I end up having to stand in on its nose. Plus I have to carve off the RJ-45 cable boot in order to thread the cable into the deeply recessed jack. I guess I’ll talk to Peer1 about exchanging our rack for a different one.
So now my back is hurt again, and our server is mounted vertically.