Category: digital.forest

cables & conduits

cables

conduit

I love looking up when in our datacenter and seeing all the well-ordered cable and conduit… for some reason it is very visually appealing. The camera can not adequately capture it because wider-angle lenses distort the straight lines, and longer focal lengths just capture a small slice of the wonder.

Big Fiber and Electrical conduits all bent around like an exhaust manifold…
Hundreds of strands of UTP all bundled and laced…
Big DC power busses neatly arrayed…
Fiber-optic cables and innerducts going hither and yon…

call me weird, but I could stare at this stuff all day long.

I love my job.

Kevin Teker gets tanked!

Where else can you mix the ultimate in high- & low-tech?

Have a look at my latest post on our support blog. This blog is mostly used to communicate scheduled maintenance and server issues to our clients. I started using it to communicate more operational detail when we went through our big facility move in 2005. You can read a sample post here.

Since then I’ve tried to let all our clients peek behind the curtain as it were at least once a month. Big issues, such as when one of the compressors in our HVAC system failed, or when we finished our recent datacenter expansion. Service affecting issues like a snow storm that may have prevented support staff from getting to the office. Our even small issues worth sharing such as this.

Datacenter Caption Contest

sorry... no pretty geeks here

In the tradition of “Fake Steve Jobs I’d like to do a caption contest.

We have a very nice datacenter facility, and a local photography studio asked us to use it to capture some images for sale as stock photography. They spent a half-day in our facility with, models and lights, and a stylist taking over our conference room for makeup, plus one of us d.f geeks watching their every move in the facility to make sure they didn’t touch anything the wrong way!

I found it funny what they chose to shoot, and where they chose to shoot. For some reason they were obsessed with this particular part of the facility. It is a “hot aisle” meaning the backsides of the servers are all pointed inward here. The HVAC systems dump cold air on the front sides and a return removes the hot air from above. It is also the “ugly” side of both of the aisles. Power and network cables everywhere and of course all that hot air blowing on you. It is also a part of the datacenter where our “single server” colocation customers are housed. This means that the variety of hardware is astounding. This of course makes cable management a real PITA. I’m not particularly proud of this view, but what can I say? They took some good shots, which have ironically turned up in print advertising and websites of our competitors! Gotta love that. I’ll share more shots later, but let’s talk about this one.

Anyway, whenever I see stock photography in a “geek” context it really stands out to me. I mean NONE of the geeks that I know and certainly none of them that work at digital.forest are this attractive. 😉 None of them have clothes this nice. None of them have this level of … what shall we say… “personal grooming.” And most importantly, none of them have two X chromosomes.

So my caption would read “We are too attractive to work here!”

What would your caption say?

Housekeeping

OK, so the sharp-eyed among you may have noticed a bit of a shake-up in the blogroll.

I’ve removed a couple of links. Bill Dickson’s server died, so he’s gone 404. I also removed Peter Lalor, since he actually died last October. I figured it was time to retire his link. Not that I’ll forget him or anything, just that his website is for all intents and purposes static. On that note I was staring at my iChat buddy list today and realized I have three dead people on it. 2006 was a hard one for me in that respect as I lost three good people. I don’t know why I chose today to remove them from my binary interfaces… it just happened. Oh well.

Anyway, I added some other links. Other friends, other websites I read, etc. Car stuff of course. Some datacenter links too. I read this stuff every day as it is the industry I live and work in. Some of you may find it interesting… or not. Just more stuff that when concatenated is chuck goolsbee.

Whoa…

I’m by no means all that interested in my orbital position in the “blogosphere”… at all. I don’t really consider this a “blog” so much as an extension of the website I started way back in 1997. That site’s original purpose, to share with our friends photos and text of my family’s life while we were overseas, has remained true. Though we’ve been back in the USA now for over eight years, and my family has opted out of participating (for the most part. Sue watches WAY TOO MUCH TV and has bought into the whole “Internet is rife with stalkers and ID thieves!” paranoia that the news media espouses CONSTANTLY) so the site is more about sharing my photos and text with my friends.

There are a bunch of you who participate right here, via the comments. There is an even larger bunch of you, who just email me directly, maintaining a sort of asynchronous communication channel, me outbound via HTTP and you inbound via SMTP. I’m OK with that too. The majority of folks in that latter category are the folks I’ve been communicating with for a LONG time. Old habits die hard I guess.

As it is, I figure that I have about 30 to 50 people, that I know personally who view this site on a regular basis. I’ve even “met” some people via this website, but none of them “face to face” so far. There are likely a few hundred folks who wander by, one offs… compulsive link followers who get here via clicking my name in another website’s comments area probably. You can measure my hits in the thousands… so I’m not cultivating a following, a technorati ranking, or any sort of revenue. If you EVER see advertising on this site, even google ads, you know it has been hijacked or something! I just can’t lower myself to “monetize” my friends. I really do see this as a form of personal communication.

So where am I going with this?

Today I was helping my staff work on deploying a frequently requested technology, and we were using this server as a guinea pig. I wondered how I, or more specifically our customers, would be able to gather data on this so I peeked at my stats. The image above snapped my head back a bit. SOMETHING I posted this month got a BUNCH of traffic. Since I do not have my stats tweaked to show granular data (remember, I really don’t care about them mostly) it took some digging and postulating to figure out what.

So it looks like the torrent of traffic started on the 14th. Looking back, the ONLY thing I can see that started that was my “William Fucking Shatner” story.

Must be the word “fucking” in there because I don’t see any incoming links for that page. So here is a hint for all you traffic whores (that means YOU John! 😉 ) use the word “fucking” a lot. heh.

“Why I Host with digital.forest” (Thanks Glenn!)

Why I Host with digital forest

Thanks Glenn for the props! It was a bit of a stressful day, even though in reality the entire operation went off without a hitch. I really do have a great team. The best geeks a measly amount of money can buy! But seriously, they did a great job, leaving me to just relay the info out to clients via the support blog.

I know Glenn is happy customer. Last year he promised to buy lunch for my entire staff… something I have yet to actually pull off. We run in shifts 24/7, so getting everyone together at once is tough. I want to get us all up to the I.D. for a Dim Sum lunch or something… easy on Glenn’s budget, but fun for all of us. Glenn’s post is a nice reminder for me to start making that happen. Shawn’s got a meeting scheduled for the entire crew soon, maybe we can do it then.

When Bill Woodcock was last here, he commented that it is ironic that this business used to be all bout bits, but it has become now all about electricity and air conditioning. Who woulda thought?