One of my hats here at 3Sharp is as sysadmin. We don't want me doing it full time, but every now and then there's a task that needs to be done and I have a couple of hours free in which to herd servers. Today was one of those days; we've been slowly amassing a pile of rackmount server hardware, and it's been piling up on a plastic banquet table in my office. Needless to say, four Dell PowerEdge servers, a KVM, and the necessary monitor/keyboard/mouse/hub/cables take up a bit of room (not to mention the noise that the Dells make!) At the same time, we had a handful of 1U HP servers in an old half-cabinet rack that used the old telco-style mounting posts instead of the newer square-hole mounting posts.
I figured that today was a good day to get the servers out of my office and into a proper new rack. It would be like a costume for them -- they'd get a chance to look like servers in a real IT organization:
But before you start thinking that they're really cute, consider how scary they'd be in the dark:
Okay, so it's really more of an excuse to play around with Paint.NET, the free .NET-based photo manipulation software I told you about last week, not really a serious IT-related post, but if you can't post a couple of pictures on Halloween, when can you? .NET was very easy to use -- the alpha version I used even detected a newer version was available and offered to let me download it -- and was the perfect tool to use to turn the pictures from my Qtek 9100 WM 5.0 PocketPC into blog fodder.