Musings of a West Texas Business Venture

I am back in Lubbock, after a grueling trip to New York. I helped a client move from one location (Roslyn Heights) to their new location (Garden City), over the course of a few days. Wednesday and Thursday were the physical move, and then Friday through Monday was mostly clean up.

The move was not exactly uneventful from a technical side of things, consisting of shutting down four servers (a firewall, a database / web server, a file and email server, and a fax server) and moving them over to the new location. Simple? Perhaps.

We did have several "gotchas" during the weekend. The biggest issue was that the fan and heat-sink fell off the CPU of the fax server, grounding itself to the bottom of the case, but still plugged into the mother board. When we powered it back up (not knowing that the issue had occurred inside of it), it shorted out and made a quick, high-pitched whine, and quit. Luckily, the hard drive remained intact, so it was just a matter of finding a new computer to host the hard drive and the Digiboard (for the modems).

Other technical issues that we ran into included swapping RAM around (we moved 1GB from the database server to the email server, but the email server will only accept ECC RAM), and a corrupt file on the database server which disabled some reports. Once the corrupt file was replaced, it worked fine. Likely, the culprit for the corrupt file was a previous unclean shutdown of the hardware at the old location (the machine hung while being shut down), and the old version of ext3 that it is running doesn't like to be shut down uncleanly.

We also took the time to add another processor to the email server, and removed a SCSI RAID-1 array that was causing some issues. One of the drives is bad, but I'm not sure which one (when I tested them independently, they worked fine).

Most of the issues we encountered were already known, or were telecom issues. It took six (6) hours more than expected to bring the data T's online, and when the phone circuit came up, we discovered that the phone numbers had not all been ported, and would be more than 3 weeks before some of them are. The client went without phone service for the entire weekend.

From the data side, with the exceptions of the few issues above, the transition was smooth. Reverse DNS and SSL certificates were known to work, and the router re-configuration and DNS updating (we host this clients' DNS systems) worked very well.

posted by Anthony Presley @ 8:34 PM