Thu Nov 13 16:07:28 PST 2008

The last few weeks, I've been setting up a small (5 racks) server room with the purchases that $OTHER_JOB recently made: 10 Sun X4140s, 2 — wait, 4 — X4240s, and one Thumper.

It's occupied a lot of my time, and before I lose the impulse, or fall asleep on my feet (second kid up at 4:30am for the last week or so; simultaneous discovery that at 4:30am I have a hard time getting back to sleep), I want to put down the things I learned.

• Power, power, power! Count it forward, count it backward, count it per rack, count it per PDU, count it per UPS, count it per breaker, count it in amps and watts, count it for 120V and 220V, count it idle and at full utilization. And then measure.

• Have a spreadsheet with the machine specs, host name, MAC addresses (if known), purpose, IP address(es), switch and console ports, rack assignment, RAID arrangement, stripe size, and favourite beer. Have it ready for the installer beforehand. I had a lot of this, but not all.

• Figure out how the hell they or you are gonna work in your space. That goes double if it's small. Tables, outlets, extension cords, network cables, switch ports…

• Figure out disk layout and OS in advance. God, what an embarrassing oversight.

• We paid for installation, and brother it was worth it.

• Sun's ldap_cachemgr does not like being told to connect to an IP address (via an entry in ou=Profiles) via SSL, and have the CN be a hostname instead. This took me a while to figure out.

But…my first batch of homebrew beer has been bottled, and a second brew day is coming up on Saturday. And apparently I'm not the only sysadmin who brews…though I'm not nearly ready to do all-grain just yet.

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