Spring cleaning

When you  have hundreds of servers at a NOC somewhere, and you’ve been around for going on nine years now, there is no getting around the fact that you will end of with a bunch of dead hardware over time: servers where the motherboards have fried, the power supplies have shot themselves, disk drives that have been replaced or pulled from retired machines, miscellaneous cables, screws, and wires. If you’re smart, you take care of these things as they happen, salvage the usable parts as spares for the other equipment, and then get rid of the rest. If you’re not smart, or if you’ve been so focused on other things that this cleanup is allowed to drop down the to do list, like me, at some point you have to bite the bullet and get to the business of getting it cleaned. This was that time.  I dragged my brother over to the NOC and we gathered up about 20 or 21 dead boxes and assorted other material that was making moving around in the cage a dance. Today, I broke out anything usable from those boxes, prepped the drives for destruction, and hauled all the servers out. I should know better than to do all that on one day – but as I was feeling uberproductive, and have felt that way since my battle with the stomach bug, I just wanted to knock it out. I did. Now my back is paying for it. Multiply the number of servers time 35-40 pounds apiece, handled several times from start to finish to determine workability, and that would probably be why. Still good exercise for the upcoming gardening season.