Reply to post: re - When was the last time YOUR server room was cleaned?

re - When was the last time YOUR server room was cleaned?

Reminds me of the occasion (circa 1982 or 83) when Trent Poly in Nottingham relocated its Computer Room into a converted college Library over the summer vaccation. Kit being moved included the single-decker bus sized DECSYSTEM-20 timesharing mainframe, with associated free standing disk and tape drives, all of which required a specialised County-level DEC LCG Field Service Engineer to supervise.

Anyway, the relocation project was planned in detail and the lifting gear etc planned to turn up with the heavy gang with a limited amount of time and, of course, on a fairly tight budget. Time factors also quite critical as the old room had to be handed over to have asbestos cleared out.

So, said LCG engineer turns up day before the big move and comes in to check out the new computer room. Looking around he's generally satisfied with the room - and then he tells us to lift up some floor tiles to check the under-floor void. Suddently he turns round to the Head of Department and sundry others with him and says: "No way is that machine moving in here with that floor!". He bends down and wipes his finger across the real floor and it comes up covered in dust to demonstrate what he means.

Turns out that when the room was convered, the existing parquet flooring was sanded flat, cleaned and vaccumed and then left in that state.

Rapid discussions came up with a plan that the floor could be sealed by varnishing it. Shortly after that four or five of us are piling into a car and haring off to a nearby DIY store and buying up almost all of its stock of large tins of floor varnish and brushes. In the mean time others in the department are busy starting to lift all the floor tiles.

By now its mid-afternoon and M-day starts first thing the next morning.

Teams of members of the department work through the night - with the bulk of it being done by the head of Application Services - and the whole job is just about finished by dawn the next morning. Mind you, anybody spending too long in the room would be high as a kite for the next few days with the vapours given off by the drying varnish.

So, actually a happy ending to the story. All systems were moved during the planned window and we were able to get the service up in time to prepare for the new term. That was until several weeks into running in the new centre, when it was discovered that the "wrong type of air conditioning had been installed" and we had to have a kettle boiling in the room at times to increase the humidity to a level that worked for the kit ... but that's a story for another time!