I got my new sliding server rack shelf/drawer all painted and installed. It is pictured here with 2 new servers atop it:



Also today I moved everything over to the much bigger, nicer and less broken KVM switch I had brought back from my old system at my parents' house. It is really nice being able to push a button to see the screen on any server again, LOL.

In other server work I managed to get VEG up and running, which is to be a proxy server for all my utility machines (Backup, MySQL, etc) that I don't have enough public IPs for but need to be separate machines. When I first opened my DSL line with Century Tel they had no idea what to do with a person who wanted multiple static IPs and I was lucky to get the 5 I did. So our personal machines, the webservers, and the utility machines are all actually behind a proxy server apiece. VEG was the last one that needed to be set up so now the "face" of the new network is complete. Woot!



The server room accumulated a new mascot over this last Christmas season: this chilly little peguin. As evidenced by the Slackware symbol on the machine behind him, most of my stuff is running Linux. LOL

More progress down in the basement today. I managed to get the rolling lumber rack completely primered, using up the rest of the older white primer in the process. The rack therefore has some blue primer too in this picture:



The blue primer is actually exactly the same color as the workbench paint I have. A kindly hardware store clerk had offered to tint the primer a paler version but by mistake the end result was nearly identical, lol. This makes it really confusing to paint over. Luckily the blue primer is almost gone too. My Spouse says that aboard ships they use pink-tinted primer to make it absolutely different from any normal ship interior color.



The underside of the server rack shelf got its 2nd coat today as well. It's looking pretty good and I hope to paint the top tomorrow. I can't wait to put it to use!

Also in basement news today, my Spouse brought the electric wood splitter down to the basement to start tackling the huge heap of wood that was too wide to fit in the boiler this year.



This little guy is just big enough to split an 18" long log. It was bought new but insanely cheaply and it has made up for its low budgetness by being exceedingly high strung and temperamental. It tends to break and/or require rebuilding on a regular basis. Here's to hoping it behaves much more nicely here in Wisconsin where it'll mostly be indoors. In Colorado it lived outside all winter on dusty bare ground, or in a snowdrift.

I really shouldn't complain. This thing is WAY less work than chopping all the wood manually using a splitting maul, which is what I did before we bought this. LOL

I did a bunch of small painting work in the basement today. First I sanded and primed the server shelf I had been working on:



I also masked off and primered the plywood bottom of the old table saw we have:



I have been using up some old primer I found lying around that only needs 2 hours to dry before the finish coat is applied, so I went ahead and put the first coat of gray on the underside of the server shelf:



This will require 2 coats of gray as this is not very opaque paint. I'll have to finish it another day.



And here's the table saw base painted bright blue, to match its big brother the radial arm saw in the background.

I also did a bunch of work to prep the rolling lumber rack I'm building for painting as well. First I took off a lot of screw stumps that were sticking out of the bed:



Oh wait. First I removed all the snowblower parts that had found their way in there. For once, the half-done projects lying around aren't all mine ;-) Then I ground down the stumps of the screws.



The above picture shows a ground-off stump at center (it is just a spot) and a still sticking up one above that. My spouse suggested I use the big disc sander to take them off and it worked great!



Neither of us actually remembers where this sander came from. I think it may have been inherited by my father from his father. I am not sure if he personally used it much though. It's amazingly powerful, though a bit scary because it just has a toggle switch for power and can be left on so when you plug it in, look out!



I also had to partly re-build the corners with longer screws to make them good and strong. I am not sure what the original issue was with them but the bottom boards were warped and pulling away at the corners. All tight now though. I redrilled the holes deeper, then held the corners with multiple C-clamps and ratcheted in longer screws.

I also filled and sanded all the holes throughout the wood rack, and washed the part where the snowblower grease had pooled up. The basement is so arid in winter it dried off really fast.



I even got it all masked off and started on the primering, but quickly realized it was getting too late to work on such a big project. So this is how it stands for now. Pretty close to done! I can't wait to put all the wood on, decluttering the basement floor quite a bit.

Today I was working in the server room but it sort of ended up being a woodshop project, hehe. I have these half height rolling racks I got insanely cheaply by buying someone's huge pile of cubix servers and related crap. You can see some of the servers in the left hand rack. I play with them sometimes to learn about beowulfing though they are a very low priority.



As you can see I haven't quite managed to migrate completely over to rack-mount equipment yet, so I have several machines that are non rackmountable. There are even more now that I brought my old system back from Minneapolis, and I need to implement a lot of those machines here since that was my primary system so it's all the best gear.



The racks have these great sliding rails that allow the servers to be pulled in and out of the rack for maintenance without disconnecting them. The picture above shows a pair of the rails pulled out like drawers.



Here's the hardware that fits on the individual servers and snaps into the drawer rails for easy mounting. My project today was to build a shelf to hold 2 free standing machines on one of these set of rails. Real shelves for racks are insanely expensive.



I started out by fastening 2 of the rails to a pair of 2x4's. Then I cut two more 2x4's to bridge the gap between the rails. I am not real good with conceptual measuring when it comes to wood; something always goes wrong. So what I did was slide the pair of 2x4's right into the rack on the rails, where they will ultimately go, and then I measured between them with a tape measure. LOL... fool proof ;-)



Then I made a top out of plywood, screwed on with countersunk drywall screws. If you think this shelf looks heavy you should feel the racks! Notice I have the rails screwed on with only 2 screws apiece. That is because I intend to remove them to paint it. They're just set in place for test purposes right now.



Underneath I put in diagonal screws to hold the corners together. I learned this technique of diagonal screwing from building porch railings for Habitat for Humanity houses in Colorado. 



One more test: I popped the shelf into the rails and made sure it works both as a drawer and as a shelf.



Here it is with the countersink holes filled and drying overnight. Next steps will be sanding, primering and then painting it with a heavy duty workbench paint, dark gray in color. Hurray!