A Lift and a Winch

Last night we moved our main server rack to it's new home upstairs in our new office space.  The problem: there's no elevator upstairs and the stairway is pretty narrow and short height wise ... measuring a few weeks ago indicated that it was impossible to get the rack up the stairway...doh!

Enter a lift and a winch...we used the church's lift unit to lift the servers up to the balcony where they could then be carried over to the new server room.  We tied the rack to our winch hanging from the catwalk and lifted the rack over the balcony where it could then be wheeled easily to it's new home.

Only 2 real snags encountered ...
1)  We couldn't get the main UPS unit to power up.  It's a 20A twist lock outlet.  Ed tested it the day before and got 120V off it...so the APC unit was taken apart and everything tested ok.  Hmm, another test of the outlet showed the problem.  120V from lead to ground BUT 55V between lead and neutral??  Nuts!  So we had to wire it up without UPS...bummer.  Electricians were onsite today and fixed it so we're back on UPS power.
2)  Our ISA2004 box would not power up after being powered down.  STINK-O-LA!  Yes, we have a key network component not running on server hardware...it's been on the to-do list for a while, but no budget for it.  A power supply swap and it was back up and running. 

Here are some some pics for you to enjoy!  Thanks to the following volunteers who gave up their evening to help us muscle hardware around ... Courtney, Russel, Dustin, Mark, and Chris ... you guys rock! :-)

Disassembly Posing

 

Jason rides up with the first server

View from top the lift...it sways a bit more than I'd prefer once up really high!

The rack awaits it's ride

Up it goes!  No, Mark is not directly under the rack...he's peeking from under the ledge to keep the rack from scraping up our new auditorium...don't think our Facilities Director would like that.

It's all moved!  Nothing fell, nobody died ... VICTORY!

Courney discovers ISA box won't power up :-(

Dustin and Chris do power supply transplant ... my desktop PC is the donor :-(

Russel decides to take a nap?  Actually he's recabling the core switch.

So the core network stuff isn't ready to move upstairs yet ... so serious VLAN kungfu will have to be planned out to make that work.

Next Tuesday we'll move the bulk of our office crud upstairs ... more fun with the lift! :-)

Comments

[Theresa Hoeft]

Gosh I have a boring job....