How I Started
I’m blaming the server that showed up on my doorstep in spring 2011. I really wanted a rack to put it in, and I didn’t have one for quite a while. Eventually I did get one, and proceeded to fill it.
I didn’t order that server. It fell off the back of a truck. Sort of.
At the time I was on the high school FRC team. Since there was usually someone at home who could sign for packages, large, heavy boxes of parts tended to get set to my house. It was the beginning of the 6 week build season, and we were getting quite a few packages.
I was also the IT department for a very small company that my mom owned. Packages for this small company were often sent to my house for the same reasons listed above. This company happened to be looking into backup solutions.
Now that you have some background info, here’s how that afternoon and following months played out.
When the LTL freight company called to schedule the delivery, my dad didn’t think there was anything strange about it.
A couple hours after I got home from school, an LTL freight truck that I wasn’t expecting pulled up. After my dad signed for the shipment, I helped carry the still-palletized box inside. After it was inside, I noticed a small sticker on the narrow end of the box.
Symantec Backup Exec 3600 R2
After a quick search, I found that these were sold for roughly $30,000. While we did have some Symantec products (not the AV, we knew better than that), it was meant for a much larger user base than our 12 person company. It had arrived at the company and address listed on the bill of lading, so I figured I would ask my mom about it after she got home.
Well, she asked about it before I did. Someone had made an error, and it wasn’t the LTL freight company. Nobody we knew had ordered it, or had been billed for it.
The box stayed sealed. This thing needed to get to it’s intended recipient, if we could figure that out. There was a phone number for the company that shipped it to us on the packing list, but it was 9PM on a Friday night.
My mom called the number on Monday. After some discussion, they said that they would call back. They did call back later that week, and essentially said we could keep it. We informed them that we would keep it sealed in the original box for six months, after which it would be recycled as we have no way to use it in our environment. If they wanted it back before then, they could contact us and arrange for pickup of the box.
It sat in the front room for six months. After that it was recycled. At this small company, any computers destined for e-waste are securely erased if they ever had company data on them. At this point any employee can claim it. Everything else is sent to an e-waste recycling company.
I kept it. I powered it up that fall, and discovered just how loud a 1U server can get. It stayed in that box, under my bed for six years and two moves. While it was under there I put together a server that was nearly silent, running on a super powerful… AMD Phenom II. I finally got that 1U into a rack in January.
During the six months that it was still sealed in the box, we slowly pieced together how it ended up on my doorstep.
The week it showed up, an identical unit somewhere in a Texas CoLo died, and this one was to be the replacement. Apparently the company names were similar enough for someone to get the shipping addresses crossed. So I wound up with a free server, and someone else had to wait another two days. An insurance company probably played some role in the company that shipped it not wanting it back.
Not long after I had this in the rack with some Cisco gear, I bought an R710. That’s how it started. I was extremely lucky that day.