Well, we are almost done installing the new rack system in our server room. It's been a long road, full of lots of purchases we didn't think of, but it's looking pretty kick ass now. Last Friday was the big circus. We had to try and move all of this stuff during the day but yet keep everything up and running as much as possible. The rack cabinet itself weighs about 250 lbs. and then there was the rack mounted UPS and the 1u rack mounted servers (the pizza boxes) and the conversion kit for our original tower model server to become rack mountable. I got to work at 7am and we left at 9pm. And we were only about half-way done at that point.

We ordered new network cables in one of every color. The lines coming out of the wall look like something from \"Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor LAN\". And then the phone system....

That's when things were starting to get fun. We have this way cool phone system here. But it's all a nest of phone wires. And all of this is crucial to us even receiving a phone call in the office. No biggie. Well, needless to say a very proprietary cable got bent and had to be put back together so that we could function. Bah.

And then we built the whole rack system only to find out that the last item to go in wouldn't fit. That meant taking everything out of the rack system and moving to vertical posts back about three inches and then putting it all back together again.

So we then go to put the last server in but somebody decided to not listen to the instructions and wanted to try some new way of mounting it. Needless to say the new way didn't work and we had to take more stuff apart to put it back together. At that point I think we were ready to kick each other.

But now it's looking pretty groovy. All our little machines are in a stack and humming along. It's like a real honest to goodness server room. And I get to show off my rack to folks who come in the office.

I shouldn't complain about our server situation too much, though. I got a phone call today from a guy in Alabama who said they were recovering from a \"squirrel attack\" in the main server room where the little guy had gotten in and pulled wires and chewed through cables. Amazing.