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So, I'm mounting an APC Matrix 5000 in one of our relay racks in the computer room this morning, and what do I discover?
I discover yet another instance of just how fucking badly this building was put together, as one end of the rack is 3/16" lower than the other.
That the floors were poured badly isn't a surprise; you can feel it walking across them. That the contractor that ran our cabling and installed the racks didn't put a shim in to level the rack, however, was.
Do you have any fucking clue how hard it is to put an 11RU shelf in to a doorframe rack that's a little more than slightly higher on one side than the other?
When you install two 11RU shelves, each with seven screws down both sides, the rack straightens. Whether it wants to or not.
These things are a pair of vertical aliminum "U" brackets, with 12-24 holes on the front and back in standard rack spacing. These are bolted in to a horizontal header and footer at the top and bottom respectively. The header is secured to a ladder frame that runs the length of the room (it's suspended from brackets hung from masonry bolts in the plenum), and the footer is bolted directly to the floor. There are four of them ganged together, and they primarily hold the patch panels that terminate the quads in all the offices, conference rooms, etc., the lines from the PBX, and they also hold all our routing, switching, firewall, and VPN access concentrators. These are all 1U, 2U, and 4U in size, and have holes with plenty of play in them, so I'd never noticed how badly the racks were aligned till now.
The APC shelving units are designed to hold several hundred pounds of battery and the Matrix base unit, and leave almost no room for variation (they are slightly elongated horizontally, but veritcally they are barely large enough to allow the machine screw in without damaging the threads).
I don't even want to know what torque stresses that rack is currently living under. I do want to know why the fuck the contractor that installed these didn't shim the gods be damned footer and level the fucking thing like they should have.
I discover yet another instance of just how fucking badly this building was put together, as one end of the rack is 3/16" lower than the other.
That the floors were poured badly isn't a surprise; you can feel it walking across them. That the contractor that ran our cabling and installed the racks didn't put a shim in to level the rack, however, was.
Do you have any fucking clue how hard it is to put an 11RU shelf in to a doorframe rack that's a little more than slightly higher on one side than the other?
When you install two 11RU shelves, each with seven screws down both sides, the rack straightens. Whether it wants to or not.
These things are a pair of vertical aliminum "U" brackets, with 12-24 holes on the front and back in standard rack spacing. These are bolted in to a horizontal header and footer at the top and bottom respectively. The header is secured to a ladder frame that runs the length of the room (it's suspended from brackets hung from masonry bolts in the plenum), and the footer is bolted directly to the floor. There are four of them ganged together, and they primarily hold the patch panels that terminate the quads in all the offices, conference rooms, etc., the lines from the PBX, and they also hold all our routing, switching, firewall, and VPN access concentrators. These are all 1U, 2U, and 4U in size, and have holes with plenty of play in them, so I'd never noticed how badly the racks were aligned till now.
The APC shelving units are designed to hold several hundred pounds of battery and the Matrix base unit, and leave almost no room for variation (they are slightly elongated horizontally, but veritcally they are barely large enough to allow the machine screw in without damaging the threads).
I don't even want to know what torque stresses that rack is currently living under. I do want to know why the fuck the contractor that installed these didn't shim the gods be damned footer and level the fucking thing like they should have.
