A Week in Greensboro, North Carolina

I spent the better part of last week in Greensboro, NC, on a work trip. One of our offices hasn’t had a local computer specialist for over six years now, which led to a lot of “general neglect” I guess you could say. The day to day stuff has been getting done — people could still log in to the server, and have been able to print — but some of the general network and computer maintenance has fallen through the cracks, so a group of us (8, in all) descended on the Greensboro office like a whirling dervish and helped get the office back up and running as efficiently as possible. Eight people may sound like a lot, but in actuality it consisted of three teams: a group of IT Reps, a group of asset/inventory specialists, and my group, the network and computer gurus.

Not knowing what to expect at the office, and since I was driving, I took my entire toolbox with me. I filled my toolbox with everything from the obvious (wire cutters, snips, screwdrivers, and a socket set) to the not-so-obvious (my drill, a hand-held sledgehammer, my volt meter, and my soldering iron). Perhaps I was overprepared, but I wanted to (a) be ready for anything and (b) use the fact that I was driving to my advantage. Yes, I drove to Greensboro, North Carolina (~1,150 miles, each way).

One of my primary tasks this past week was to clean and organize the office’s server room, which had both been greatly neglected and had become a holding area for outdated hardware. One of the things I brought with me was 150 new 5′ network cables (green, for Greensboro), three new Cisco switches, and an entire roll of Velcro. I was really proud with how the server room looked when I was done organizing it.

Here’s a before shot of the wiring running to the switches. The different colors, lengths, and cable types tells me that these cables have slowly been being added over the past several years.

Here how the wiring looked after I was finished. All the cables are now the same length, color, and neatly tucked away. It’s amazing what a little bit of Velcro can do for a server rack!

Here are two more “before” pictures. The first is of the server itself. Note that it is on a shelf on the right-hand side of the room. The keyboard/monitor/mouse, along with the tape backup unit, are sitting on what used to be a useful workspace.

And here’s an overall shot of the room, before. Note all the extra equipment lined up along the left hand side of the room.

Here’s what the server room looked like when I was finished. The server has been relocated to the cart on the left hand side of the switch rack (rear left). All the cabling in the switch rack has been tidied up. And look on the right hand side — a clean, usable work area!

Something I was really proud of was this silly little bracket I made. The tape backup unit, which is approximately 36″ deep, got relocated to a shelf that is only 18″ deep. I didn’t feel comfortable leaving the heavy tape backup unit perched up on that shelf, so I ended up refashioning a bracket off of one of the old Cisco rack-mounted switches into a mounting bracket for the tape backup unit. With a little moving and bending I was able to get the bracket to line up with the mounting holes on the side of the tape backup unit. Using some shallow screws I had brought with me, I mounted the bracket to the shelf. I then took our KVM unit, removed a screw from the side of its case, placed it on top of the tape backup unit, and threaded the screw back through the bracket and into the original hole. The end result was a sturdily-mounted unit, using only a few cents worth of parts. I was pretty happy with the end result; so happy, in fact, that I showed it to everyone who happened to walk through the server room over the next couple of hours.

Tuesday for lunch we ate at Fatz, which was excellent, and had dinner at Captain Bill’s Seafood and Steak. I had an odd exchange with a waitress there that went like this:

Me: How is the Greek Chicken?
Waitress: Welllllll … Do you still have your gallbladder?
Me: (blank stare)

(For what it’s worth, it wasn’t bad.)

Wednesday for lunch the office bought us pizza from George’s Pizza & Subs, which was greatly appreciated, and for dinner we had ate at an incredibly uncreatively-named Mexican restaurant named Mexico Restaurant. I had the nacho special named … well, Nacho Special.

I drove home in one straight 20-hour shot, something I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. I rolled in to town sometime around 2am Friday morning, slept in, and went to work Friday afternoon.