In order for our department to function we had to get out from under the main company’s security policy, in order to do that we need our own infrastructure. Our security policy (I wrote it) basically says you (we are all developers in this department) are your own system administrator (part of the job description). You are responsible for whatever your workstation does on our network network, if I have to pull your plug and you can’t do your job that’s on you, not me. Sounds harsh but in practice not so much.

We took a disused electrical service room, Facilities brought me more air-conditioning that I could have wished for, and Maintenance gave me an old equipment rack. The two Dell boxes down on the bottom are nothing to get excited about but the SuperMicro on top, I built from scratch (about half the price of a comparable Dell and yes I counted my labor). Now, I have no illusions that this server room is going to win any beauty contests but these three machines run our Firewall, phones(Asterisk), file servers (SMB and NFS), backups, and Android builds. If something breaks, I have parts–you try getting more than an appeasement engineer in the four hour response time here in Louisville Kentucky. The only downtime we’ve had in about a year is when a fan failed on one of those old Dells, we lost an hour of Internet. Oh, those two things on the right are interesting they are Braille printers (embossers).