Dawn of a New Age

Thursday afternoon (I know, it’s been a while, but things happen) I got an email that the router was ready for installation.  I was to meet the gent who worked on it for me at the data center Thursday evening at 6PM.

By the time we got there it was 6:15. By the time my router guru got there it was over an hour later. Life happens.

A few minor settings so the router would work with our servers and IP#s, and downstairs to the cabinet to do the installation.

Oops… We couldn’t install it. Remembered to bring the cage nuts; forgot the shelving.

Locked everything into the cabinet and went to dinner at Los Angeles’ most underrated place for steak, the surprisingly inexpensive Pantry on Figueroa and 9th. Yes, I know it gets bad reviews from sophisticates thinking it’s going to be something different, but it is what it is, I’ve been going since 1976, it still has lines, is still never without a customer 24/7, and still gets Angelinos who’ve been coming since forever.

Surprise, though: they no longer serve the Rib Steak. For me it was the best in the house, and this was the second time I’ve been in a month… and they didn’t have it.

So I spoke to the manager, who explained that they had been getting what he called mixed quality, and were looking for a new supplier.

I hope they get one soon; the other steaks huge and a great value (the most expensive a tenderloin at $22) and it’s the only place I know of where the steak takes up the whole plate; everything else is on side dishes. But the Rib Steak was to me the best, and I miss it.

Took yesterday off for the holiday. Today working on new servers to install, and putting the shelves and some sets of rack rails into the car so I won’t forget ‘em next time.

What are Cage Nuts, you ask?

It’s okay if you don’t know, I didn’t until a few days ago.

In all the data centers we’ve used in the recent past there have been screw holes right into the rack frame inside the cabinets, and we screwed either the servers, the cabinet shelves, or the server rails, right into the rack frame.

However in our new data centers things are a bit more complex. The cabinets are of fixed width and depth, but inside them the rack frame is fully adjustable, though by default it comes in the right size to install our standard hosting servers.

But instead of threaded screw holes, the rack frames in the new cabinets have square holes. While most of us know since earliest pre-school days that you can’t fit a round screw into a square hole (at least not if you want it to hold the computer), that’s exactly the task at hand.

The hardware required to do this is called a cage nut. And each server requires eight of them; two on either side on the front and two on either side at the back.

The cage nuts look like this.

A pack of 25 costs about $32 after tax. Remember, 8 per server. $10.25 per server, for screws and nuts.

Maybe I should have titled this entry Nuts.

The good news is that the router should be ready by tomorrow, and the shelving should arrive tomorrow or Wednesday.

I’ll keep you posted.

Thursday. Night.

Yesterday was a long day. The dawn of a new age almost always is.

Let’s start at the beginning. NoBaloney Internet Services was my idea, back about eight and a half years ago. Started with one Cobalt Raq 2.

Here I was, with a server and a bit of Linux knowledge. I joined the Cobalt RaQ-Users mailing list for support, but it seemed that I knew quite a bit more than most RaQ users. I found myself the one-eyed king in the valley of the blind, so I had to learn; folk were actually depending on me.

We didn’t end up with a gazillion customers like many of the big webhosting companies you find today, but we’ve been enjoy slow steady growth, supporting everyone from the smallest clients to the largest, and many other webhosting companies as well.

Over the years we ran Cobalt RaQ servers, Plesk servers, and now DirectAdmin servers. Each step of the way we’ve strived to offer good service, good value, and the best hardware, software and service we could find.

Since the beginning we’ve partnered in datacenters rather than take on our own space, but about a year ago we knew this wasn’t going to work for us much longer.

So a few months ago we began our quest for some datacenter space we could call our own.

For almost a year now we’ve known we’ll be moving to a new datacenter, and about a month ago we made our selection.

600 West Seventh St., Los Angeles. Not a fancy name, but a quality datacenter.It’s just about a block from the famous One Wilshire building, in downtown Los Angeles.

Yesterday morning was spent provisioning the hardware and OS for our new router. The old one is a great performer, averaging over 1-1/2 years uptime, and we’d keep using it, except that we’ve decided to keep both buildings up for about a month and a half; that way if we make a mistake when moving a server we can always take it back to the old building and start over with little loss of uptime.

Today I was sidetracked taking care of some Secure Certificates that Comodo decided to revoke. Why? Because they were created with keys made with that Debian Key-Pair Security flaw that surfaced not to long ago.

And a pesky nameserver near Amsterdam we had to re-provision.

We did manage to find some server mounting hardware for the new datacenter; we’ll order it tomorrow. And we managed to prepare a network map for the servers moving into the new data center over the next few weeks.

Tomorrow our Network specialist should provision the new router software and one of our trusty Dell managed switches; we use them to give each of our dedicated and colocated servers it’s own complete private network.
Here’s to a lot of exciting tomorrows.