Weekend Recap

It was quite a weekend. This is the one that we at work have been building up to for the last 8 months. We finally moved from our old alternate site to the brand, spanking new data center. It was not fraught without challenges, but the job got done nevertheless.

There are five people on my team and the new data center houses two groups. We've done almost all the work at getting things ready to move and executing the move. One of the other groups helped with some of the networking, but we did the bulk of it. Our vendor was there to help, too. We were actually supposed to move in August, but because of the extra rain we got this year, we got moved back a couple of months. And because of the rain, there was extra mud. And we were on the critical path for another part of the company to expand their equipment into the space we were vacating.

Anyway, the plan was to go to the old site, shutdown computers, pull cables, then come in the next morning and start loading them in the moving van, then on to the new site, unload and set everything back up. Nice plan, right? Well Murphy decided to camp out with us. Part of our fiber network was not working, but could have been by move day and our contingency plan was to bring the old fibers with us, but we didn't get the word that the network wasn't ready. So we had to go back to the old site and recover all the fibers.

Then the floor of the computer room was filthy. I've been over there nearly every day for the past two weeks and have swept up as much as I can. It's hard to sweep 4000 square feet with a plain old broom. If you know anything about computers, they don't like dirt and there was a lot to not like that day. I ran over to Wally World and bought a vacuum cleaner, mops, buckets, and floor cleaner and several of us went after the dirt. The dirt got us at least once that we know of with a problem with one piece of hardware getting too dirty to operate properly.

Then we had electrical problems. Some of the receptacles were the wrong amperage. We had to get an emergency electrician to come out and fix that. The good thing about that was that he works for the guy in charge of housekeeping for the company and he was able to get a crew out the next morning to do a real job of sweeping and mopping. I'm not a huge fan of wet-mopping a computer room floor because of the potential for spilling water into the sub-floor and shorting something out, but I was far more than willing to let them mop as much as they wanted to. At least the dust cloud in the room diminished significantly.

We got everything up and running by late last night, so I would say it was a successful move. As I said, I hurt all over because it was a physically demanding job, but at least I can now sit at my desk and do what I need to do remotely. I love remote computing!

Sadly I didn't get to see much of my family this weekend, but at least the kids are old enough to know that I have to work like that sometimes. Fortunately it's almost over. Two more weekend nights after this weekend and we're done! Yea!

In other news we have reservations to take our oldest son to Vegas to celebrate his 21st birthday. That's what he wanted, so we're doing our best. He wanted to be able to walk into a casino at 12:01 on his birthday to play a hand of blackjack, but we just couldn't swing it. Airfare was outrageous and holiday rates were in effect at the hotels. His birthday is Dec. 22. He has agreed to let us take him in January, before DS#2 starts back to school from the holidays. It should be a lot of fun.

Have a great day, all!