Placement – Going Great!

Well I am currently sat next to the rack at Bluesquare. I’ve finished my list of jobs in which I have had a couple of setbacks. Mainly that one of the server’s hard drives pretended to die while I was here. Just waiting to make sure the raid array sorts its self out and I don’t have to replace the drive, so I thought I’d do something constructive and write a post on my placement so far.

I’m at Bluesquare today installing a server that died over xmas. It was a weird one. The server’s motherboard had died, it lost its network ports a while back but it has finally given up. It took a memory stick and two hard drives with it. The memory stick was a new one for me, I had never seen a duff memory stick before but the hard drives where a common model to fail so they are no surprise. Also xmas a dual (supposedly redundant) power supply also failed in another server. That was a quick fix and I replaced it when I was here last. Although two other servers were complaining about losing power supplies, I’ve had to replace 3 PSU modules now.
Today has been a long day, I arrived at about 10am (Note to self: Destroy the satnav) it’s about 6.30pm now. I installed the server this morning which took about 2 hours as I had picked up the wrong rack rails. They are not compatible with the server case. The holes on the rail are too small for the screw holes on the case. I thought this was all standardised but obviously not.

We’ve had quite a lot of hardware failures lately including a cisco switch. I’m taking it back to HQ to investigate it more but it is sending scrambled text over the console connection.

Update: I didn’t post this on the day so it’s a little delayed. Also back at HQ the cisco switch weirdly fixed it’s self :/ *Scratches head*