Lesson Learned from Experience

Just a little tip for all you present and future System Administrators out there. Do not
set heavy equipment on top of things mounted in a rack. The rails for most equipment are designed to hold only the weight of that equipment. What can happen if this advice is not taken? Well here is a little story for you.

A previous sysadmin at my current job set a large (about 60 pounds) Dell PowerEdge server on top of a rack mount tape library. In an effort to correct some problems with said tape library, I remove the PowerEdge server and slide the tape library out of the rack on the rails. As the library (which itself weighs about 50 pounds with the tape magazines out of it) got to the end of the rails it fell out of one. Lucky for me it was only a couple of inches off the ground, but I did have to fight it pretty hard to get it out of the other rail due to the angle that it was at now. Once I got the library out of the rails I started working on it, when I noticed a small metal bracket and ball bearings on the floor. It turns out that the stress of the added weight of the server bent the retaining bracket for the bearings. Now I have to find all the ball bearings, because the scattered and figure out how to put the rail back together.

I hope that this information will be helpful to others, even though it is pure common sense.