Well, this past weekend we had some fun at the datacenter. We drove down to US Internet, the datacenter where we house all of our servers. The purpose of the visit was to install 4 new servers, and migrate all of our servers into a new rack.
Up until now, we had been leasing a 1/4 rack (or 10U of rackspace) and we upgraded to a full (42U) rack by ourselves.
When we got to the datacenter around 8:30pm, they knew we were coming, but there was a miscommunication between my account rep and the support staff, so our new rack had not been set up. So they called in one of their lead network engineers from home, who came and set up our new rack for us. While we waited, we went to Bakers Square to grab a bite to eat.
10:30pm, we were finally able to start moving servers. We first installed the rackmount shelf that we brought down, as well as the 4 new servers we brought. Then we started migrating our servers one by one from the old rack into the new rack. This was a fun and tedous process. A couple of times, we installed the rack rails upside down and had to fix it before we could mount the servers properly in the new rack.
We finished moving servers around 2:30am and started working on cable management. Re-organizing the network cables and power cables in the rack to make everything neat and organized. I worked on the cable management while Tim (my system administrator) started installing FreeBSD on one of our new servers. We hit a snag with the installation, since the installer didn’t want to see the network to download the packages. So we decided to let it be and come back with the full 6-CD set to install via CD, and configure the network after FreeBSD is installed.
We didn’t get out of the datacenter until after 4am. By that time, both Tim and myself were pretty brain dead, as well as tired from moving the servers around inside the racks.
We took some pictures of the process, and they’re in my photo album.
ETA on getting FreeBSD installed on the trouble server is Thursday… at least it’s a new server, and there isn’t as much of a rush to get it online. Better to make sure everything gets installed/configured properly the first time, than living with a rush job/mistakes later on.
