First rule of data-centre visits

Posted in: Tech

It's quite simple:

However long you think it'll take, multiply that by about five

...and you'll get a considerably more realistic view of how long you'll be freezing your ass off and accumulating ear damage thanks to the aircon and army of fans, discs, and blowers.

Case in point: sshd was dropping incoming connections on one of my servers for some reason. Putting aside the mind-dissolvingly tedious 1hr10 trip across town (and back) it should've taken about 30mins. It took a little over 2h30. Not because it took a long time to restart a service but something(s) consumed those other two hours. At a more cosmic level the underlying reason isn't that important, except to be sure that it'll take about five times longer than you imagined. God help you if you think you have a two hour job on your hands; I've had server moves take literally entire days.

I can only think of one visit to a data centre out of dozens that took even remotely what I had expected, and even that was accompanied by an insanely high time-to-get-there : time-inside-data-centre. (Dec 2000, Monterey to Santa Cruz and back to reboot a machine and replace an initial # in a start-up file...).

Posted by Paul Makepeace at September 16, 2004 02:29 | TrackBack