My day job interfering with my wagon

Starting to get back to normal again.

I've not been around these parts much lately due to a work project taking up too much of my time. At long last the project is pretty close to complete and not draining so much of my time. Some folks I know online have wondered where I was and what I was doing for the last couple of months. I was tasked with migrating all of the equipment recently purchased by the company that I work for to my server room in our office. They had acquired a functioning portion of another company and all of the hardware required to make what they had purchased work.

The equipment is actually a little old and almost all of it is extremely heavy. It took three days to tear it down from where it was located, load it into a truck, unload and rebuild it all at it's new location. I had forgotten just how heavy this kind of stuff can be. I had also forgotten just how bad my back is. I was having a lot of trouble sitting/standing/walking for quite some time and my junior guys spent a lot of time taking things away from me when I went to pick them up.

The installation included 2x 16KVA uninterruptible power supplies which resulted in having an additional 200A electrical service installed in our 4th floor office as well as piping and electrical for a 2nd 60,000BTU air conditioner.

It's not nearly as cool as working on my wagon, but I'm quite proud of having taken a barely functioning batch of equipment, relocating and rebuilding it, and making it live again. There is still a lot of cleaning, tidying , etc to do but the hard work is over. I'm still finding little bits and pieces that had failed and the previous owners failed to notice or just didn't care, but it is running nonetheless and I'm kinda happy about it. It's a pretty small installation compared to many, but it's mine.

If anyone is interested in just what all this old gear is doing I'll be happy to geek out on specs and whatnot. For now, here are a few pics.

 

Oh, yeah....I get it. Sure....I understand all that stuff.:confused:

 

Isn't that some kind of Amplifier for a Guitar?

 

I think it's an early cell phone.......

 

Now I know where your name comes from..Cyber Wizard indeed!

 

It makes almost as much noise!

 

I thought it was a early vertion of a home PC

Welcome back CW

 

I understand Cyber I went from working 0 hours a week to working 60 hours 6 days a week. Glad to be back working but it is cutting into my station wagon forums time also...If I could only hit the lottery!

 

Thing-a-ma-jig !

Let's don't tell him, but those things have been replaced by laptops and cell phones! I'm wonderin if he hauled all that stuff in a station wagon.

 

...funny you should ask.

The bulk of the equipment had to be hauled in a rental truck. I had to get a 24 footer in order to get a lift on the back due to the weight of much of this stuff.

The company that had all of this stuff was notorious for purchasing high end equipment, buying way more than they needed, and stashing it all away. As they were selling the building and moving to a smaller location they had no use for several storage rooms worth of computer gear.
The server equipment was a package deal but they explained that we were welcome to come out and take any other items that we wanted. I spent 4 full days out there sifting through rooms of computer hardware that they were prepared to let us take at no charge. My Roadmaster got pressed into service and was filled to the gunnels three times over before I ever touched the server room. It was a geeks playground for some time.

 

Free Stuff ????

It's rare when you can get anythng free. Especially if it's electronics and you know how to use it. I've had a home computer for around five years and I still have to figure out how to turn it on sometimes. Glad you did use your wagon for some of the work. Makes it all worth while.

 

Well I think congratulations are in order! That is very impressive. Looks organized and very tidy...I'm not sure what it is but I'm impressed just the same

 

Its the boat anchor from the Edmond Fitzgerald!

File server, right? Glad its not on my hydro bill.

I ran something similar in Mexico, a mini-mainframe server to run 1250 injection machines and old Wang Materials management workstations (ManMan). Fugly! Those old green text worsktation monitors were tough stuff though. Even scorpion-proof. We'd often walk into the rooms with Air Conditioning and find the little boogers huddling around out of the heat!

Glad I forgot most of it, or they'd be hauling me in a box too!

 

After loading and unloading it from the truck, I felt like hauling up the Edmond Fitzgerald might have been easier.

Actually that SAN is split about 70/30 between file storage, and Virtual Machine hosting. The RAID array keeps my VM's a little safer when disks fail. When I first powered the thing on I found 7 failed drives. All of the hot-spare disks were already in use which made for a very long night when disk number 8 finally died. The rest of those little servers are web crawlers to gather business info to supply to web directories like YellowPages. The little buggers run 24/7 and the previous owners didn't tell us how poorly maintained they were. The little beasties have been a pretty hefty thorn in my side since we got them. In time I'll get them rebuilt MY way and then I can relax.

We're in a really fortunate spot in that our landlord includes hydro in our rent. I already had 4 30A circuits in my server room and this install resulted in an additional 200A service, all with no increase in operating costs. Heaven help us if we ever move out of this place.