Working at the Office

I know today was a Saturday, but unfortunately my job sometimes requires working at un-sociable times. The 24th April was one of these.

The work had been planned for a few weeks, the business were aware that it was going to happen, and my team had been information and agreed to the work - well that was the plan.

We are now in a situation where we don't have enough room in our server racks. I know for a fact that in the next few weeks, we will need to install another 8U of kit. The intention therefore was to remove the standard 17" monitors that we are currently using and replace them with super duper flat screen versions. We also need to move a few servers around so that we can free up large chucks of space rather than just the monitor space at the top of the rack.

I appreciate that it was only going to be at the most 3 racks but the overtime was offered to the three team members. Two of them accepted, until Friday and then one pulled out. The excuse being 'I'm studying'. That therefore left myself and my trainee to do the weekend work. Luckily, my wife has a good knowledge of the tasks that I was doing so she kindly agreed to help us.

We therefore came into the office and checked everything before powering down the network. The power down took 30 minutes, so that sounded pretty good for the power up and check out.

After ripping all the old cabling out, we were then able to correctly cable the servers, including power cables and iLO & network cables. Unfortunately this recabling took longer than expected and we weren't ready to check the systems until 2pm. This was the time the business had been told that everything would be sorted.

It took us another 2 1/2 hours to power on and check out the servers. That was a mega task and luckily everything (within reason) worked successfully.

After clearing up, we then headed home. I didn't feel too bad to begin with, but it definately hit me later in the evening. I could hardly walk. I felt like an old man. It was amazing how much pain the days work gave me. The muscles around my thigh bones were giving me an amazing amount of pain.

Hopefully the pain will go soon. I don't want to be like this for to long.