The following is account of my adventure of do very light hardware admin stuff in the firm server room
[There will not be a TLDR]:
Since I knew I was going to work in the server room, I wore an ultra light golf shirt. Its okay if it got dirty. Its pretty old and I have plenty of them.
I arrived at work at 6:42 AM and clock in. I go to the lawyer who owns the firm. He let me into the server room. It’s in a small walk in closet. I looked at it and saw it would not be possible for me to walk behind it. I legit wondered who thought that was a good idea. I felt like a part of my tech soul died when I saw how it was set up. He mentioned getting me permanent access [Got it. This is going to be a room I may have to go in from time to time]. I told him I’d be coordinating with IT in our FL firm at about 8:30.
I looked at the two power strips I’d be labeling on an excel spreadsheet and with a label maker in the real world. Neither one had the serial number visible on front or back. I’m pretty sure if I took them out of the rack I could find it on the bottom or top. I sat in the chair in the server room and thought for a moment on how to identify them in an easy to understand way. Then it came to me: I could use the slot number on the server rack to reference which power strip and what was connected to the power strips on the server rack. It wasn’t too loud.
I make sure to have my team covered by my supervisor. I also let my supervisor know about a potential problem I was monitoring with the person I was training who just joined my team.
9:10 FL IT finally calls. They give me the serial numbers. I told them the serial number wasn’t visible and told them about my number slot idea. They approved it and said that would work. I then asked them if they knew the joule rating of the power strips. They asked me why… which caused me to sigh internally. I told them because its a good idea to know the joules so you can know how much you connect and how much it can handle. They said no and I later looked these power strips up. I’ll get to that later in this story just brace your self for the shocking number I found.
I went back into the server room with my moleskin grid pocket journal and got to work tracing what was plugged where.
What info did I get:
The name of the item plugged in with it’s serial number
Where the item was on the server rack, if it was.
10:30 the label maker ran out labels. I switched to stickies
11:45 I get asked if I could switch out a pc control machine. I agree to after lunch.
1:00 I switch it out and let IT in FL know. They thank me for this.
1:10 I get to work inputting the info and decided to see if I could find out the joules by googling…
… So no where on the own website for the company that makes the power strip is there any identification of what the joules are. I found a reddit thread where a person gave an estimate of what it actually was 600 to 1000 joules. Look I can’t work off a guess. I need precision to gave an accurate accounting. Bare in mind I’m also doing my managing of a team at the same time.
2:30 I finish and send off the excel to IT in FL. They never replied back by the time I left at 5:00 PM.
Our firm is moving to a new space in Septemberish, I’m going to talk with the lawyer who owns the firm and ask for the next server room if they could design it so I could or any person who has to work on it can access the back.
