Computer Room Cleanup and re-cabling Pics and Movies

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Computer Room Cleanup and re-cabling Pics and Movies

So a few weeks ago, we spent our Saterday doing major recable work on the new Technical Computer room (TCR) in the new location, in preperation for our Big Bang services move coming up on the 5^th of July (it was delayed from the 22^nd))

So thise pics and videos are a few weeks old now, but who cares.

PICTURES (scroll down for movies)

Not enough room to neatly get all the fat KVM cables sorted, so later I actually extended the room for the cables to 2U, and used the cable guide rail only for ethernet cables and power.

2U above the KVM not just being used for those fat cables, but also for the Avocent Switchview box, and its adapter, that is attached to the HP KVM box. Advocent KVM/IP hardware rocks by the way. If you have a non-IP KVM swich, consider the Switchview IP 1020, it makes life so much easier and they are super simple to set up!

Too many cables, not enough room. Once we are done with the move, I am gonna seriously tie this shit down. Meanwhile I curse those HP 10K racks for not having ANY room at the sides for large cable bundles. Oh.. not to mention ANYTHING to attach a tierib to!

The lineup of servers. The missing one was at the old location being synced up with another FTP box.

The master at work ;)

Not easy to work with all the cables all over the place.

The patch panel guys where not done yet as you can see.

Hello!

Mustafa putting some of the servers into cold storage. You wouldn’t believe the kind of hardware we will end up putting into storage cause we have no immediate use for it!

This is what happens when you dont move your servers professionally. We dont have the budget for it, so that is our exuse. Servers where fine, though I would not recommend this.

Carting around servers.

So very little room to work with. Look at the space at the sides, notice the PDU, then imagine it being full of servers. See my point?

So here we decided to move some servers over to the middle rack. This is partly to do with the fact that I discovered we dont have nearly enough power connectors in these racks to fill them.

I havent been back there since, I really hope they cleared these bundles up now.

I hate loose cables like that.

HP-UX on a 9000 box. Very old, but still used. Hosts a warehouse management system, all terminal based.

The proud admin of the HP box.

Richard wasnt very usefull during our work, so he caught up on project admin ;)

MOVIES

A lot of engineers in a small space. This movie gives you an idea of the space :)

Me working on the cables. All the cables all over the floor was half the point of tackling this place, what a mess.

Me working on getting the KVM set up. The little box is the Avocent IP View 1020

The most important element of our productivity right there!

All the “temporary” plugs and cables finally being cleared out. I wonder how many admins out there wish they had the time or the downtime to do the same and really clean house.

Overview of our LAN and WAN racks.

Making slow but steady progress on the cables. 3 ours later it would look very diffferent!

Labling ALL of your cables on both ends means you can accuractly document what hooks up to what from A-Z. Doing the initial labeling though is a pain, so this is where our “certified labeler” came in ;)

The amount of old hardware our IT department has in stock is just crazy. They dont know what to do with it all! We should have a CRT yardsale or something. Anyone need a Lexmark multifunctional? The IBM xseries 336 being stored here are only a fraction of the hardware we will be storing.

Its 2 am and the end of our scheduled downtime. Clearing up the last stuff and wiping the servers off, and turning em all back on. Hooked up to the new UPS, we could finally have them ALL on without burning out the old grid. The best bit of all was we managed to clear almost all cables from the floor.