Clean Server Room
I spent the better part of today going through the server room and cleaning out years of accumulated junk that had been thrown in there.
Highlights include:
- 100+ DLT backup tapes, all headed to the degausser on campus
- 30 heavy gauge power cables from various servers
- Norton Internet Security 2004, never opened
- Office 2000
- Tons and tons and tons of empty boxes.
The goal? To make it so that when I need to retreat away from the noise of my office and actually get some work done, I have a place to go that not only has a door, but a door protected by a mag reader. And, if I position myself close enough to the Liebert (which is where the table is in the room) I don't get blown on. The ambient temperature of the room is about 74 F which isn't bad, and the noise from the servers is at least better than listening to people talking loudly.
Oh, and Jae is a jerk.
Productive at Work
Over the last few days I've setup Dell Openmanage and finished tweaking our install of IPMonitor. Now, when a service goes down or there's a hardware failure I'll get an email notifying me. You'd think that this would have been setup before, but my predecessor apparently just scheduled weekly walkthroughs of the two datacenters to look for amber lights on the servers.
Tomorrow's project will be configuring tighter rules for alerting that will go right to my phone via a text message (I only want the really critical errors to come there) as well as automatically open up a helpdesk ticket. I also began sketching out a new server inventory which I will need to put into Sharepoint along with some other documentation.
It's a fairly slow time right now, and since I've gone to work in academia I've really enjoyed the ability to set things up the right way, rather than rush from fire to fire like I had to do in startup-land. That's not to say that I don't miss some of the fun of being in a startup - I worked with some absolutely brilliant people at Grid, and I really miss spending time with them and having debates and conversations about tech.
I also found a piece of software which, so far, has helped me a lot. My desk is right outside of the office that the desktop support folks work out of, and there's a lot of traffic in and out of there. It's very distracting to be troubleshooting some server or network problem and hear people BS'ing with the desktop folks. Since my desk is actually in a really nice space (although it's a bit small) and there's political reasons why I can't move into an office, it's become imperative that I find some way of isolating myself. Well, besides the big frosted Japanese privacy screen that I set up in front of my cube, I found an OSX White Noise Generator, Noisy. I have it set to generate pink noise at about 10% of my iMac's volume. It's a small app that I just keep open on my second monitor and jack up the volume if someone starts talking loudly or I really need to focus.
I still miss working with Jae, even if he was noisy.