Surprisingly the DELL server showed up late Friday afternoon last week

when I was expecting more of a Wed-Thur delivery this week. It was a

pretty small box, only about 2/3 or so of the length I expected. Since

I'd grabbed an LCD monitor as well I wasn't actually sure if I'd gotten

a monitor or server and had to open the box.

It's a PowerEdge 750, which is a small 1u server, designed for web farm type environments. We got it from the Dell Outlet

for a great price. US$1444 for the server, 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, RAID 1

(2x36GB). A good deal as the cheapest servers there this week are over

$2k! After checking that this was the right box, I put it in the car,

planning on going Mon morning. As usual I got delayed, and that was ok

since the monitor showed up the morning and I took both over yesterday

afternoon.

I opened the boxes, made some room on my shelf and put the monitor in

there. There's a crash cart in the data center with a monitor and

keyboard, but last time I was there it was in use and I couldn't work.

That's annoying, so it's why I grabbed an LCD monitor. So that went in

easy and then I opened the server box and grabbed the rails, checking

to be sure I had right on the right side and same for left. And ...

I figured out relatively quickly that square connectors don't fit into round holes 🙁

They'd come with the server and I never checked to see about the rails.

DELL servers and racks are square hole by default, while I think most

of the rest of the world is round. No huge deal as I have a couple

servers rack mounted, so I put it on top of one of those. I hooked up

power and was ready for KVM when I realized that I didn't have any more

KVM cables. A few years back when my startup failed I'd lucked into an

8 port KVM and 4  cables that had been sitting in my basement

until we got this site up and running.  We've grown to 5 servers

now and I was out of cable. No worries, I took the ones from the KVM

and used them, booting the server and starting setup. Then I was off to

Microcenter for 2 new KVM cables.

I didn't get back last night, but today I hooked things up, called the

firewall guy to get the new server connected, and I'm getting ready for

IIS configuration as I type this.