YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Most of the work in/around DCs is contract of some sort. Local structured cabling firms, electricians doing stints of various lengths, security, etc. Some of it good and lucrative, some of it not.

When I joined that ISP we had ~2000 subscribers, and one modem rack that could take 30 concurrent 33.6k dial-ins. The company had just been acquired by a small independent telco in Cheshire, headquartered in a small town that is most famous for a weekly farmers market and an annual steam rally.

We shared that headquarters at first with the founder's other business - a dating agency for rich people in later years - and slowly took over.

The building was a farmhouse of sorts. We'd turned into a rabbit warren of offices, and then, we decided to expand.

First we turned one of the offices into a "machine room". We didn't even bother with fire suppression that first time, we just ripped up the carpet and laid some laminate, put some 19" racks in and got the power upgraded. The air-con was insufficient in that room and the following summer I had to wheel in portable units and had a Cisco router in there report that the inlet fan had a temperature of ~80C. That was around the same time the chief of staff was asking us why we wore jeans and t-shirts and couldn't we wear suits? No, no we could not wear suits.

Bit by bit we took over more rooms through the building, we started working in a portacabin in the car park (where the neighbouring farmer's sheepdog would join us for lunch).

At some point we needed to install ~20k modems, (Nortel CVX1800s - 56kbps had arrived!), and the telephone switch to run it, so somebody bought a second hand DMS100 that went into another room we had converted.

By that point the dating agency had moved out.

We needed another ~100 servers as well to manage email, web hosting, and so on. Those came in parts (motherboards, cases, RAM sticks, hard drives - about £500k worth in 1999 money), and we had to build them and install BSD on them (first OpenBSD, then FreeBSD, long story). We also had to make our own ethernet cables, which is where I learned I can't wire ethernet cables if my life depended on it.

Within 12 months from when we started, we were handling 750,000 dial-in customers.

Around September of 1999 I left and that was when the company had heard about a custom built data centre that was up for sale in Milton Keynes, so decided to move everything there. Around that time they were pouring concrete under the floors of all those rooms we'd thrown racks in because the timber floor joists (!) were starting to give way under the weight of the kit.

That company got acquired and then went through a weird route, but basically it's still going as a major UK ISP. I'll keep the name private to protect the guilty. :)

2000 subscribers, and one modem rack to that and a business still operating 27 years later. A lot of sausage rolls, plenty of sticking plasters for the cuts from those shitty cases, and almost every day ending with a couple of pints in a pub somewhere.

One of my old colleagues and I often think back to that being one of the best years of work in our lives. But... data centre work is horrid, dirty, hot, and underpaid for what it is. But you can - sometimes - be part of something kind of cool and fun, and something very few people get to see or understand.

But there's a reason I've stuck to software ever since. :)

There, saved you from reading a story that isn't really informative and only was written because of the politics surrounding DCs are keeping them in the news.