Scroll the menu to find all the places to visit
Server Reorganisation
25 May 2009It’s been rather busy of late and I’ve only just got chance to start posting again. So I thought I’d best begin by posting about the weekend of the 8th, 9th and 10th of May.
We had spent several weeks planning the work for this weekend including having the first ICT team away day. The aim of the day was to carry out a number of infrastructure changes to position us to be able to overcome a few historical obstacles and to position us for the future.
Friday 8 May
The work began at noon on Friday with the ICT team updating the software on the organisation’s servers. Along with all of the usual Microsoft updates, there were a number of other administrative updates to go alongside. This was also a valuable opportunity to have a good trawl through the system logs looking for anything else that might mean the servers were not running optimally.
Saturday 9 May
Saturday was predominantly a lift and shift day with four of us working in the tiny chilled server room to re-rack the
majority of the servers into contiguous blocks to make space to rack
more servers. Incorporated into this work we racked up four new servers
and a disk array - more about the specific purpose of these in future
posts I hope.
Along with the physical arrangement of the servers, the work also began on recabling and relabelling the servers. This was further complicated by the necessity to rack up the servers to a Raritan KVM and our UPS systems and an increase in numbers of servers certainly makes it more difficult to keep on top of this.
Sunday 10 May
After completing the cabling and labelling and having some discussions about strategies for software deployment for some upcoming end user hardware updates the day drew to a close with an afternoon of deploying a new network administration password and general testing.
Whilst not without issue, the weekend’s work has now opened up new opportunities for how to better use the ICT infrastructure to support the work of the Academy.
