Technology at Harley

I’ve been meaning to reorganize one of our servers racks for quite a while now. I have a big UPS to mount in the rack, but according to the manufacturer they recommend not mounted any servers within 12-18 inches of the transformer as the magnets inside can damage other magnetic media such as server hard drives.

In order to mount this UPS, I had to move 2 servers to made the necessary room.  Unfortunately, they were two very important server that couldn’t be arbitrarily turned off: Exchange (email) and Oracle (our student information system database).

Usually I would do something like this early in the morning before school starts, but family responsibilities now make that impossible. I ended up doing it in the morning on the first day of holiday break. Nobody was around so the timing wasn’t as important.

I wanted to mount these all in one solid block, but that 2u-sized hole in the middle was about 1/32″ too small to slide the email server into.  I still don’t really understand why it didn’t fit and was not very happy about it because I had already shut down the email server. So instead of a 5 minute move, I had to remount the rails and it turned into a 30 minute affair. It all worked out in the end though.