Yesterday was spent moving the computer resources at work (Cendio AB) from our old offices to our new ones. Quite an exhausting day.

As usual when you move stuff, things break. And regardless of how much you plan and try to think about everything, things go wrong. \

One example of the former was that the power supply of our firewall choose to break down completely when we tried to start it at its new location. The horror, the horror! Fortunately, we had an older machine of the same type which from which we could steal the power supply, and so far, it’s been running stable. I’ll keep an eye on it, as the machine we stole the power supply from have shown stability problems. Trust me, I’ll definitely order a new power supply for shelf storage.. \

On the “things go wrong” side, there was a complete misunderstanding on how our new network connection (from the same company that provided the old one, Tele2) should be configured. Straightening that out took its time, so we had about 3 hours of complete downtime for our web server. On the other hand, given the broken firewall, I think only about 1½ hour can be blamed on Tele2, and 3 hours is quite OK for such a low traffic site.\

After these two mishaps, most of the other work went fine. We were especially horrified by the fact that our Xerox 432 SLX (a scanner/copier/printer/fax thing which as all printers is most happy when its not working) worked right out of the box - we just connected it to power, network and phone line, and everything worked as intended. I’m sure it will break completely as revenge some other time when we really really need it. There’s a saying - God created the computer network, the devil responded by creating the printers. Very true, if you ask me.

Not only did I and my colleague Peter install and configure computers in the new computer room, while my two other colleagues moved the rest of our computers from our old location to the other - I also had to keep an eye on the transport of the Xerox, the move of our fax telephone line, the installation of fire extinguishers and installation of the alarm system. Lots of things to keep in the head, lots of phone calls. I counted twentyseven phonecalls during the day.

Eleven hours of sleep later, my muscles are complaining about spending most of yesterday carrying computers and crawling around 19” racks. Ouch! But I’m very happy with our new computer room - everything neatly installed in two racks instead of spread around a large room. Network equipment mounted well, and new KVM switches making work in the computer room much easier (our old ones were like playing russian roulette - you newer knew if you could get a console on the server you needed access to). \