Servers Installed

George, Justin and I spent most of Saturday and part of Sunday either traveling to/from the data center, or inside setting things up.

My access badges were still not ready so Otto (a sysadmin from our provider) met us at the facility to let us into the server room. Our rack was ready and waiting, with a Cat5 network drop from the top. The space was quite large (5000 square feet), raised floor space with separate NOC offices.

As Justin and I started putting the machines on the shelves, George started configuring the switch. Justin and I made good time installing all the servers into the racks, but slowed down on the cabling and labeling. Without proper labeling, your future data center visits are much less fun.

After we had the switch configured, we plugged it in to test. Everything was fine, so we plugged in the Airport Express so all the laptops had internet access, for IM and search. The rest of the configuration went slowly but smoothly, configuring the web servers, the feed parsing boxes, the database server, and finally the load balancers.

One load balancer would not come up correctly in the failover position, so it headed back home to be repaired.

All the cables were tied into place with “FeedLounge colored” orange cable ties and blue cable wraps. Alex and his organizational skills must be rubbing off of me. I even logged everything we had to do in Tasks Pro. This organizational thing is still new to me.

One of the interesting experiences was the experience of that much electricity for our intern. Justin was amazed that you can feel the electricity.

We finished up about 11pm, and headed out to find some dinner. I want to personally thank George and Justin for their help in the setup process. Without them, I would have spend all 3 weekend days in the colo by myself. I also want to thank Otto for his gracious help in giving us everything we needed, when we needed it.

Installed:

• 1 managed gigabit switch
• 1 load balancer (will be 2 soon)
• 2 web servers, serving the FeedLounge web interface
• 2 feed downloading and parsing servers
• 1 database server

Since we are trying to bootstrap this operation, some of the essential system administration equipment was left for the next upgrade. Things like Power Distribution Units (for remote power control), Terminal Server (for remote configuration of machines before/while they boot up), etc.

Once we can get the alpha speed back to an acceptable level (with the associated scalability features in place), we can prep the feature set for beta and we can also upgrade the infrastructure. The key components: rack, power, and connectivity, are there, and upgradable very quickly.