In Southern California, Rancho Cucamonga to be exact, assisting with a network rebuild at one of our warehouses. As usual with these projects, we start early in the morning after a caffeine jumpstart at the local Starbucks and work until after dark. The first day, Friday, we never left the building…about a 100′ walk from the server room. Saturday I did get a chance to stroll outside on a couple of occasions and look at the mountain range rising behind the jail. The peaks had a good covering of snow, courtesy of the heavy storms mid- week that almost canceled our installation. I was struck by the haze hiding the base of the mountains, a typical view according to the locals…
And just at sunset (still about three hours work to go)
For those of you who have never seen a “server room,” prepare to be disappointed. Most are not anything like you see in the movies. They are usually just a bunch of computers in a room with a mass of wires and cables running hither and yon. It is not until you get to big networks that they take on the appearance of the fancy server centers the media is so fond of.
Here is the “server room” at the warehouse and our Network Architect, Tom Scott, making sense of the spaghetti known as network cabling. The main server is actually housed inside the big gray cabinet (a specially built… and expensive… box designed mainly to keep curious fingers away from the computer).
Please note two essential IT tools at the lower left: a cup of Starbucks coffee (that one is Tom’s, mine is much closer to me, behind the camera) and a pair of scissors.
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