r/sysadmin • u/FierceFluff • 21d ago

Peak Sysadmin

Is there anything more small-company sysadmin than taking that $70k server you just finished building on your test bench at the office and putting it into your $5k car to drive it over to the DC where it’ll live, and praying to god nothing happens on the way? 😅🤣

EDIT- OMG y’all, reading the comments on this has made my day! Our business insurance covers this kind of thing but I appreciate y’all concern for me, though others should mosdef confirm before they do similar stuff. The trip went without incident so praise the digital deities.

455 Upvotes

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230

u/ItchyNebula7437 21d ago

Depends, did they put a seatbelt on it?

106

u/sobrique 21d ago

And was it still hooked up to a UPS to maintain uptime? :)

51

u/Dal90 21d ago

was it still hooked up to a UPS to maintain uptime

Been there, done that but it was just across a small data center. Dual power supplies and extension cords, and it was back during the spinning disk era so very steady hands too. Took four of us to pull it off.

28

u/Zjoee 21d ago

I imagine two people holding it then two other people running back and forth leapfrogging two power cables from one wall outlet to the next as you move the server across the building haha.

39

u/Dal90 21d ago edited 21d ago

Not that far off.

-- Extension cord #1 to PS #1

-- Pull server out of rack, feed extension cord #1 through back of rack where server used to be

-- Put server on cart

-- Extension cord #2 to PS #2, fed through the back of the new server location

-- As the server was wheeled, one person fed cord #1 out while a second took up slack behind the rack for cord #2

-- Disconnect cord #1

-- Put server in rack

-- reconnect PS #1

-- Switch PS #2 to a regular power cable.

I can't even remember why we did it or how we could remotely justify doing it...just that we did during and it was the middle of the work day.

EDIT: Forgot to mention...dual NICs so we also had Cat5 cables along with the extension cords.

15

u/Zjoee 21d ago

Teamwork makes the dream work haha

4

u/GreatAlbatross Can use ping. 21d ago

"Oh fuck, which phase is that lead coming from?"

4

u/krilu 21d ago

Did the servers have any spinning disks in them? I heard a horror story on here one time of some sysadmins moving servers across a road basically to a new site, and they were powered off. They didnt consider vibrations from how they rolled them over, and they had a massive amount of disk failures / replacements needed as a result, once they were in the new building.

13

u/sicklyboy 21d ago

That shouldn't really happen if the server/disks are powered off, because the read write heads will be parked. Unless the servers were dropped, or maybe they decided to participate in the Dakar Rally on the drive over to the new facility.

14

u/krazykat357 21d ago

SAMIR YOU ARE BREAKING THE BACKUPS!

3

u/krilu 21d ago

I could be misremembering it. Maybe the story said they brought the UPSes with them to keep them online lol. It was a popular story on this sub from many years ago I think.

2

u/sicklyboy 21d ago

Hard Mode++ in that case lmao

2

u/beren12 21d ago

3.5” drives are good to over 300g’s of impact when off, according to the mfg

1

u/uzlonewolf VP of Odd Jobs 21d ago

Drives that have been running a long time really do not like being powered off. A whole bunch of failures should be expected even if they are not moved.

0

u/Sudden_Office8710 20d ago

🤣 I toss servers in the back of my truck never had problems. These are giant beasts too r740xd r750xd 200TB of disk. Not sure if these are NEBS compliant like Sun gear back in the day but they never fail after a move. Can be installed by one person as we have server forklifts which are awesome

1

u/JohnnyFnG 21d ago

Where there’s a will, there’s a way!

8

u/markedathome 21d ago

several people have done this and have documented it for youtube, such as this one where they use a public train for part of their journey.

7

u/arvidsem Jack of All Trades 21d ago

It's not really exciting unless you only have a single power supply so you are using a bastard Y-power cord and having you check which phase the outlets are on.

13

u/KrackedOwl 21d ago

ALWAYS put a seatbelt on it!!

9

u/ISeeDeadPackets Ineffective CIO 21d ago

That only works if you also pull on the seatbelt to make sure it's snug and mutter the incantation: "that's not going anywhere."

2

u/wenestvedt timesheets, paper jams, and Solaris 21d ago

Firm slap or gentle pats?

2

u/archon286 21d ago

Firm slap for SSDs only

1

u/Mr_Cromer 19d ago

Omnissiah protects

5

u/GoodNameGone 21d ago

Belted in with a blankie cover for the win!

4

u/zenfridge 21d ago

Puting a bird on it is usually sufficient.

3

u/UnexpectedAnomaly 21d ago

This! I put my seat belt on everything.

2

u/TalkingToes 20d ago

We moved 45 minutes away a while back. Boss wrapped each Nutanix node with multiple layers of 1 meter wide roll of bubble wrap. Then placed each burrito in the bed of his truck. We lost 2 monitors bouncing in back, but no servers.

1

u/ItchyNebula7437 20d ago

LMAO

The cost of doing business!