Some things you learn or discover

During the last 48 hours a lot of things have happened and I dealt with a lot of hardware. I took some notes for future reference.

First, always take a camera with you. Take pictures of everything, and then catalog them. You can always go back and see how things where inside your servers or around them. Don’t remember if a ethernet cable is connected to the onboard ethernet or the external one? Just go and look.

Second, some vendors have some strange notions about accessibility, so be prepared.

Third, forget about boot floppies and CDs, just install a recent linux distribution in a brand new IDE disk, and use that as a rescue system.

Fourth, make sure your backups work, and make sure they are compreensive.

Fifth, if your monitoring system is hosed, don’t wait a month or two to put the new one in place.

That’s all folks,