The Weekend That Was

Technically, the weekend isn't over yet but despite my best hopes, it never really started for me.

A friend of mine and I were organizing a hike for a large group of friends, our annual pilgrimmage to Wolf Gap, VA, for this Saturday. In all, we were expecting about 20 people to attend from our square dance clubs, our happy hour group and various other social connections. My Dear Employer announced this Wednesday, however, that I would be needed at the data center for all of Saturday to facilitate the transfer of equipment from one of our subsidiaries. Fantastic.

I shouldn't complain overmuch, I suppose: the guys from the subsidiary had to get up earlier than I did on Saturday to dismantle & pack the equipment and then drive from New Jersey to Virginia. My part only started once they arrived.

The equipment & crew arrived around 12pm Saturday. We were able to off-load the equipment easily. While the racking of equipment was uneventful, it was time consuming as only a couple of people could work at a time in the cramped space. It didn't help that my early preparation work was all for nothing as there had been a revision to the racking plan which wasn't relayed to me in time.

By 10pm, we were powering up components for testing but the network config stuff wasn't done. Apparently no one had discussed the vlan port allocations to make all of this work; the network manager was unavailable at that hour and his alternate wasn't current on the project and unwilling to make any changes without a plan or authorization from his boss --which is sensible really since we're talking about production systems. In any case, without the network configuration work, our testing was dead in the water so after some discussion with the project manager, we packed up for the night and headed home.

We reconvened at the data center at 7am today to resume work. The California-based project manager had discussed some of the issues with the rest of the California-based team last night so some network configuration work had been done. Checking when we arrived however, while we did get a series of green LEDs on the switches, the vlan values weren't quite right. And as luck would have it, our in-house work ticket system was dead so we couldn't update tickets with needs, tasks or completion information. Figures.

At 8am, we sent three out of the four visitors back to New Jersey: the remaining debugging work didn't require all of them. Once we got the Californians out of bed yet again, we were able to finish the required bits and we were largely done by 10am.

There is still some minor work to do: we don't have enough power cables so some of the less critical dual-powered servers are currently running on single power for now. I'm also concerned about how few ports are left on my main network switches: we're going to need to look at adding some ports very soon if there are many more toys added.

On the good side, the extra time sitting & waiting presented me an opportunity to empty out and re-sort my storage bins. When I began working here, I quickly acquired a number of bins in which to store all of the loose odds & ends, spare network cables, spare power cables, and such. The priority at the time was simply cleaning up what was a god-awful mess. With time on my hands, I was able to empty out many of the bins and resort the contents into a more sensible order, relegating seldom/never used pieces to the bottom stack while the most frequently used bits were transferred to transparent bins more easily accessible. There is one bin I should be more aggressive about sorting & trashing its contents but that can wait for another day.

The Weekend That Was

Technically, the weekend isn't over yet but despite my best hopes, it never really started for me.

A friend of mine and I were organizing a hike for a large group of friends, our annual pilgrimmage to Wolf Gap, VA, for this Saturday. In all, we were expecting about 20 people to attend from our square dance clubs, our happy hour group and various other social connections. My Dear Employer announced this Wednesday, however, that I would be needed at the data center for all of Saturday to facilitate the transfer of equipment from one of our subsidiaries. Fantastic.

I shouldn't complain overmuch, I suppose: the guys from the subsidiary had to get up earlier than I did on Saturday to dismantle & pack the equipment and then drive from New Jersey to Virginia. My part only started once they arrived.

The equipment & crew arrived around 12pm Saturday. We were able to off-load the equipment easily. While the racking of equipment was uneventful, it was time consuming as only a couple of people could work at a time in the cramped space. It didn't help that my early preparation work was all for nothing as there had been a revision to the racking plan which wasn't relayed to me in time.

By 10pm, we were powering up components for testing but the network config stuff wasn't done. Apparently no one had discussed the vlan port allocations to make all of this work; the network manager was unavailable at that hour and his alternate wasn't current on the project and unwilling to make any changes without a plan or authorization from his boss --which is sensible really since we're talking about production systems. In any case, without the network configuration work, our testing was dead in the water so after some discussion with the project manager, we packed up for the night and headed home.

We reconvened at the data center at 7am today to resume work. The California-based project manager had discussed some of the issues with the rest of the California-based team last night so some network configuration work had been done. Checking when we arrived however, while we did get a series of green LEDs on the switches, the vlan values weren't quite right. And as luck would have it, our in-house work ticket system was dead so we couldn't update tickets with needs, tasks or completion information. Figures.

At 8am, we sent three out of the four visitors back to New Jersey: the remaining debugging work didn't require all of them. Once we got the Californians out of bed yet again, we were able to finish the required bits and we were largely done by 10am.

There is still some minor work to do: we don't have enough power cables so some of the less critical dual-powered servers are currently running on single power for now. I'm also concerned about how few ports are left on my main network switches: we're going to need to look at adding some ports very soon if there are many more toys added.

On the good side, the extra time sitting & waiting presented me an opportunity to empty out and re-sort my storage bins. When I began working here, I quickly acquired a number of bins in which to store all of the loose odds & ends, spare network cables, spare power cables, and such. The priority at the time was simply cleaning up what was a god-awful mess. With time on my hands, I was able to empty out many of the bins and resort the contents into a more sensible order, relegating seldom/never used pieces to the bottom stack while the most frequently used bits were transferred to transparent bins more easily accessible. There is one bin I should be more aggressive about sorting & trashing its contents but that can wait for another day.