The story behind all this equipment is as follows. Also your Curing Consolitis video parts one and two contributed to this.
About 4 years ago I was running around downtown and passed a junkyard. They had a small store front across the street so I went in to take a look. They had some very dated equipment for resale, some old keyboards and monitors but across the street in their storage yard I notices a fat stack of suranwraped servers sitting on a pallet. I asked the guy at the cash register if I can go into the storage lot to look around. He was apprehensive at first but eventually gave into my request (i assume he was concerned about injury liability).
I walk across the street and make my way around the lot. It was full of these absolutely massive cardboard boxes, about 6x6x4ft. Each box contained keyboards, mice, printers etc… and most of it was sun damaged or had water spots on it. As I’m making my way to the back of the lot a very tall, dark, and handsome APC server rack was blocking my path. I thought to myself, this could be useful, so I bought it. I paid the guy at the cash register $125 for the rack and didn’t mention the equipment inside.
What was inside was a 8 port high density KVM switch (AP5201), a strange but cool pullout keyboard and fold-up monitor (AP5717 17" rack LCD Console), the Catalyst 2560G switch, IBM H series bladecenter (no blades in it though), a bunch of random rack mounting rails, and three spiders nests.
After paying I pushed it the rack a good 75 yards across the lot to the loading zone. I called a buddy to bring a truck and shows up with the truck bed already full while towing a second empty pick-up truck bed behind him. We made the mistake of leaving all of the equipment in the rack when we tried loading it. Eventually the staff got upset we were taking so long and brought over the forklift and loaded it into the second empty truck bed, standing upright.
We drove it back to my house, nearly flipping the truck on each turn because of the weight and height of the rack standing so high above the tires. When we got to the house, we backed up the truck bed in the driveway and ran into our next problem. The in-tow pickup truck bed was almost 3 1/2 feet from the ground. We didn’t have a forklift, ramp, or straps and I just stared at it for minutes to try and find a solution.
Eurika! I removed the server equipment on the inside of the rack to help lighten it and then… We pushed it off the back of the truck, while it was standing upright, 3 1/2 down onto the concrete front door first. Then pushed it up the concrete driveway, scraping off the paint and making deep scratches into the front door. After we got it into the garage we stood it upright and made plans to re paint and hammer out any bends and dents.
The repaint went very nicely, none of the main internal framing or side panels were damaged.
Below is a photo about a week later. It shows the original equipment that came with it, minus the patch panel, I had just added that before taking the picture (which is in snapchat form, I apologies apologise).