Time to move on (1)

Yes, it’s finally here: The day of the office move. Because this might be the highlight of my whole work placement, I am skipping the quirky introduction for today. This is going to be an article solely about work (you have been warned)!

I started the day early in the office, being the second one to arrive. I started to pack most of my belongings into boxes. The disassembly of the rack was scheduled to happen at 09:30. The VM’s were shut down and the physical server were ready to move. There was this one minor obstacle remaining: We did not have the credentials to access the DrayTek router in the new office. They were supposed to be the default log-in settings (admin/admin), but somehow the router ended up having other credentials, which we did not know. The router was ergo not accessible up until today. Which actually led to a problem concerning configuring the access point. Why? Address conflict. The DrayTek router had the same static IP assigned as the TP-Link (= access point) (192.168.1.1), while trying to connect to the TP-Link it redirected me to the router’s login page. Funnily enough, when we (Josh and myself) tried it today, it sometimes redirected us to the TP-link and other times to the router. While we sat there in the new office, looking at this mess, the Mail including the credentials finally arrived. From then on it was easy to configure the router with the appropriate LAN address and the necessary NAT-rules (and some firewall settings were changed). Afterwards we could configure the TP-Link as well. This all happened before noon.

The first step was successfully taken, but the physical move and the subsequent functionality of the servers was still a hassle to worry about. As indicated above, we planned on moving the network before the actual move. That would have given us a time buffer to get the network running. But we ended up not doing it, our co-workers were too busy printing until the very last second. The network equipment was now set to get moved along with the other stuff. And we could only hope that we would not need that buffer.

The moving truck was supposed to come at 2 o’clock, but didn’t arrive before 2:45 PM. At that point the real physical work began. I think everyone has done this kind of labour at some point in live, I don’t have to tell you how exhausting it was. But let’s skip to the point at which we faced the undamaged network equipment in the new office. Theoretically we just had to plug everything in and it would work right away. Practice is a whole nother story. [To be continued…]