So, today I started de-racking all the equipment and rackmount kits from the Digital racks we picked up in Virginia Beach. Now, I'm as much a proponent of tidy cable management as the next guy, but whoever cabled these racks apparently thought nylon tie-wraps were a religious sacrament. (Either that, or he figured they were going out of fashion and figured he'd better use'em while stocks lasted.) There's places in those racks where the same bundle of cables is secured to the same rail by three tie-wraps spaced half an inch apart. I've been going through the racks with a set of diagonal cutters. Clip, clip, clip, clip, clip, clip, clip, clip, clip, clip .... one foot of cable freed; move down below the next bracket; clip, clip, clip, clip, clip,clip, clip, clip, clip.........
And who was the genius who designed DEC Storageworks array controller boxes with the SCSI cable connections directly on the backplane, and no risers, so that you have to tear the entire damn controller box apart just to be able to reach in far enough to plug or unplug a cable?
I'd like to be able to re-use the power concentrators, but they have NEMA L5-30P plugs on them. Pretty hard to find an L5-30R receptacle outside of a business environment.
Update:
It was a long struggle, but I've finally got everything out of the racks except the Alphaservers themselves, the power concentrators, and the rear locking bars that don't work anyway. De-racking the Alphaservers is a two-person job, and I'm not quite certain how I'm going to get the locking bars out, because it looks like you have to remove the locking bar to get to the screws you need to remove to get the locking bar out. I don't know how they got them in there, unless they installed the brackets first then assembled the bars from the bottom with the rack laid on its side.