Sysadmin:Server Room

This is an overview about the CS server room.

About the space

The server room is in the basement of Noyes, part of the science complex that predates the CST. If you need access, your supervisor will request keys for you.

Lobby

At one time the lobby housed all of the Earlham College Computer Science Department. Now it serves as a combination of storage space and repair depot for problematic machines.

Server room proper

The server room itself contains the production hardware.

Racks

The northernmost rack is nicknamed the "Arctic" rack. It houses our firewall, which is the doorway to the entire system and applies rules to filter malicious traffic. It also houses our uninterruptible power supply or UPS, which we use as backup power in the event that this space experiences an unexpected power loss. On the diagram, these are represented by the green lines at the bottom of the image.

In the middle is the "equatorial" rack. Until recently, this was our oldest cluster. After drives and other components began failing, we chose to retire the cluster and repurposed the still-functioning machines, which now support backups and system monitoring.

On the south end is the "Antarctic" rack. This contains the Layout and Wachowski clusters. It also houses Smiley, a host for virtual machines.

Additional components

In front of the server room, you'll see a couple of monitors, some noise-canceling headphones, and a keyboard. This is a console to allow us to connect to these computers directly rather than over the network.

Computers get hot, so we have air conditioning to keep them from overheating. Cold air comes in from the front of the servers and the warm air generated by the fans is blown out of vents on the back.

A fiber patch panel on the wall connects our firewall back to ITS, across campus in the library. That that's where our Internet comes from. There is also extensive intra-networking through a series of switches, connecting the servers on the different racks.