And it only took 3 hours more than expected...

I went into work tonight to swap some CPU's in some servers. Our web server mix needed a little extra pick me up for tomorrow night, so I swapped the 800MHz processors out for 1GHz processors. (For those IA32 people out there saying "1GHz? That's it?", I say "it's PARISC chips, apples to oranges.) Anyway, I was in to swap processors. I got into the first machine and discovered that HP switched to Tamper-Proof Torx bits for their processors. This was a little frustrating, since we don't have any of these drivers in the Data Center. I have none at home. I went back into the ops center, and one of the guys from my office called in asking about the home page. I asked him if he had any of the Torx drivers with the little hole in the shaft. (I didn't know the real name of them then.) He said he thought he did, I asked if he would mind driving them in to me. 20 minutes later, he showed up with them. He had bought the things just 10 days ago, just before a conference he went to. Rod must be living right, he was inspired to impluse buy the right thing.

I got the first 2 machines down, and pulled the processors, but I couldn't get them back into the CPU socket. It was maddening. It turns out that HP has inplemented an ingenious little locking mechanism for their processors. You need a long 2.5mm allen wrench to engage it with the processor in place, but it slides the processor and socket assembly into place to allow you to secure the processors into the socket. It's really a neat little thing, but for about 45 minutes, it really ticked me off. Once I had the problem figured out, I didn't have a 2.5mm allen wrench long enough to engage the mechanism to fit the processor on. (And I had 2 machines taken apart...

I took a trip down to the office, and inside Uncle Ledge's Tool Bag, he has a 'heavy duty super long hex key' set. I had really forgotten he had that in there, and was just grasping at straws before I went to Walmart to buy the right tool.

Having the correct tools in my hands, swapping out the processors was a smooth and happy process. I was done in 40 minutes after that.

One of the reasons working here is great is that sometimes you get the 90% inspiration you need to avoid the 90% persipation. Without it tonight, a) I would never have gotten the processors off the origonal machines in the first place, and b) I would have never gotten them back on again. This would lead to c) my being very ticked off, and d) a call to HP. I often wonder if the same types and levels of inspiration would happen if I worked elsewhere.