Moving Servers

Today was a pretty hectic day. I wanted to move servers from the old server room in NARL building 360 into the BARC server room now that it had a decent UPS. First we moved the Apple Xserve and it's raid array. There were a bunch of network cables and I unplugged the wrong one. I plugged it back in where I thought it came out of and it turns out that the cable wasn't plugged in at all. Plugging it into a switch port created a loop in the network. This brought down the wireless link and subsequently, all connectivity to the Internet. After I was made aware of the problem, it took about 15 minutes to figure out what happened and remove the offending cable. Frustrating.

We did eventually get everything done. Now we need to move the old UPS units into the building 360 server room. This should give us the run time that we really need. I'm really glad that there was plenty of help from UAF for all of the tasks that I had wanted to get done during this visit.

Another real plus on this trip has been the Dell Mini9. I have been trying to use it as much as possible and it has been working out great. Sometimes, the screen has proven to be a little small (1024x600) compared to the Macbook Pro (1440x900) especially when I ssh into one of the hosts and need to do a little cut and paste between windows. Other than that, it has been great. The battery lasts for about 3½ hours with the wireless in use all the time. The keyboard is still a bit cramped but still use able. This picture really shows the difference in size between my MacBook Pro and the Dell Mini9. I think I will be using the Dell when traveling unless I really need the screen real estate.