In which I’m a total fucking geek.

Since Shegeki put a picture of a rack on his blog today, I decided to do it too. Here are a few images of the data center where I work.

Cobalt Web Servers

The bright blue servers on the right are the stupid Cobalt RAQ web servers that I hate to death. Goblinbox has, in the past few years, lived on three of those four remaining servers, and I ended up having to move it because each time the server fucked up in some major way and my site wouldn’t work.

Lately, Buzzdoctor and I have been moving customers off of these boxes – an astonishingly boring and tedious procedure because it’s not automated and it involves contacting customers – and eventually we hope to shut them down, take them out of their racks, and shoot them with automatic weapons until they explode spectacularly.

Once I spent hours trapped in the data center on the phone with Cobalt tech support. I finally made it through to their third tier support and enjoyed flirting with the geek who was helping me… but the problem – scripts wouldn’t run – never did get solved and we had to wipe the box and start with a fresh install, which sucked and took a long damn time and wouldn’t have happened if there’d been a patch.

Big Brown Digital Switch

This is a big brown thing. It’s telephony gear. I don’t know much about it other than it’s a digital switch and there’s some kind of voice traffic in there. I remember something about ATM from the meetings a few years ago, too. I like it mainly because brown is my favorite color, and also because Lance (the guy who started this company) was so cute and geeked out when he told me he’d bought the whole thing for pennies on the dollar from some poor defunct CLEC.

Total Control

This is the Total Control chassis. When you use a computer to call one of this ISP‘s dial-up numbers, you get connected to this thing. All those stacked green lights indicate that customers are connected – I think each green light represents 8 or 12 customers, and each card has 12 lights. (Or something. I haven’t had anything to do with this chassis in three or four years, but once upon a time I knew how to get into the thing via its management interface and was on call three days a week in case it went down.)

Anyway, if you were to pull one of those cards it would disconnect a whole bunch of dial-up customers all at once. I’ve had occasion to pull active cards out before, and it’s deeply satisfying knowing that you just disconnected like a hundred porn downloads in one fell swoop.

Bonus: My Favorite Working-at-an-ISP Story

Years ago, Sam and I had to replace the aged UPS at one of the POPs. We walked up to a bank of whirring, flashing, humming equipment… and yanked the plug out of the wall. It took 45 seconds for the whole thing to spin down to silence. It was so, so fun disconnecting an entire town’s worth of Internet traffic all at once! OOH, THE POWER!

We had the new UPS in and everything booting back up within seconds, so the outage was probably less than three minutes, but still. The power, people. The power. It’s why I love knowing that I could read anybody’s email. I mean, I never do (because how boring would that be!), but I could.