A little rewiring never hurt

The old saying of "if it's not broken don't fix it" is good advice in most cases. Except when you have a small group of servers that suddenly turns into a large rack full of servers. The rats nest of ethernet cables was beginning to be a bit of a problem so I decided to rewire my rack.

They have been doing the wiring in a new frame at work and I saw the way "the real wiring guys" put in wiring. Although my results are not quite as professional as theirs I did make a large improvement. To be honest the professional wiring people make cable look amazing. I now understand how the network engineers can get so excited about ethernet cable.

I even added some additional connections for some of the nic's I was not using at the time for future expansion and flexibility. Now if I need an additional IP address or network connection its a matter of a few ifconfig commands rather than going down and finding a cable long enough and getting the cable connected.

On the optical side of the house I was able to organize some of my fibre cables a little more as well. I have dual fibre hubs and a few of the server's hooked up to the SAN so the optical cables were getting a bit tangled too.

Fun in Downtown Atlanta

We had a tornado downtown as most everyone know's by now due to the media coverage. I guess nothing will get media attention than a CNN building having most of its windows blown out by a tornado. The tornado itself is nothing compared to the aftermath.

Since it has been a week before they started any work boarding up and removing remaining window glass from the broken windows in the Westin Peachtree Hotel high winds have caused pressure issues inside the hotel which has "popped out" many full panes of glass sending them raining down on Peachtree st below. Peachtree street is now completely blocked off to both vehicle and pedestrian traffic. Supposedly the entire building moved a few feet as well but thats only what I have heard and I have not really seen anything to confirm this.

Getting anywhere on Peachtree is somewhat of a challenge as they also decided to close the Peachtree Center Marta station and are sending commuters down to the 5 points station. To get to the parking deck that I park in I have to redirect down at least 10 side streets many of which close and open for no real logical reason at all other than the whim of construction crews and Atlanta Police. I consider myself lucky that my commute is during off hours. Several of my co workers have been stuck in nightmare bumper to bumper traffic on some of the small back streets in an attempt to get to and from the office. Hopefully things are going to get wrapped up soon so that the city can get back to business as soon as possible. The Peachtree Center mall has completely been shut down due to its proximity to the Westin and the America's Mart may have to cancel some very profitable conventions because of the streets being blocked.