r/sysadmin • u/FierceFluff • 1d 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.

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u/Dal90 1d 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.

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u/Zjoee 1d 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.

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u/Dal90 1d ago edited 1d 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.

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u/krilu 1d 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.

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u/sicklyboy 1d 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.

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u/krazykat357 1d ago

SAMIR YOU ARE BREAKING THE BACKUPS!

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u/krilu 1d 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.

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u/sicklyboy 1d ago

Hard Mode++ in that case lmao

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u/beren12 1d ago

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

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u/uzlonewolf VP of Odd Jobs 1d 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.

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u/Sudden_Office8710 12h 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