Blog: Archive for August, 2002

I might be wrong, but I think I have time to add the occasional entry to my blog again....

My replacement rack arrived yesterday—the mount for one of the four levelling screws was bent or welded wrong, so the screw was at about a thirty-degree angle, so they sent me a new one. With M's help I got it swapped out with the damaged one, remounted all the rails and shelves I'd mounted in the old one before discovering the bent mount, got the UPS mounted, and went on and mounted the KVM switch and the gigabit Ethernet switch as well. We even got the new server mounted properly.

On Monday I got sendmail working on the new machine, so it's ready to take over for mail delivery and reception, as well as file service. Once that happens, I can migrate the rest of the services off the old server without much pressure.

Anyway, the insane thing is that they didn't just send the rack—they sent everything else they'd sent me. A 3000 VA UPS. Three 1U shelves. A keyboard tray and a special keyboard. Side safety braces. All of which, of course, has to go back. So I got two palettes, unloaded the rack from one, put the old rack on that palette, and left the other palette alone 'til it gets picked up.

Looks like we'll have Mac OS X 10.2 pretty soon. M is actually updating an old installation on a spare partition on her work machine; our actual CDs should arrive this week. I haven't seen it yet, though, I was busy installing the rackmount powerstrips I'd ordered.

My fingertips are all bruised and cut up from doing and undoing keyboard, serial, SCSI, and other cables that use those damn thumbscrews. It's kind of amazing—one or two aren't that bad, but when you start doing a couple of dozen (last week I also moved the department's 15-node Beowulf cluster), your hands get beat up pretty quickly.

Much ado about nothing as a box I called to have picked up by Airborne vanished before I could put the airbill on it.

After asking innumerable people whether they'd seen it, poking around in dumpsters under the searing sun, and calling security, one kind soul suggested that I check with Airborne in case they'd picked it up without telling anyone. They had. Ugh.