Wobbly servers!
 

I had some co-workers put together a wooden construction to stack up my servers. It's a bit wobbly! Will my hard drives suffer?

Depends...a modern hard drive can take a nudge...where is your company located? On a fault line? if not, you're okay...just advise your co-workers to (maybe) take wood classes :D

What is "wobbly" anyway? A sway? A shake? A wobble whenever someone tip-toes by?

Thor

It's only a slight movement if you touch the rack. No hard drive failure yet!

As long as it remains upright you should be ok. But if you come into work and your rack is on the floor along with your servers and there are pieces scattered all over the floor you might have problems.

Of course, the choice is entirely yours. Either level up with your co-workders and get it fortified, or risk...

...Linux, the freedom of choice, even in the furniture :D

I can't help but wonder two things about this situation:

1. If the server(s) are owned by a company, why won't they buy an actual rack for them?
2. If the co-workers did a crap job, why aren't they fixing it?

Either would seem like a good fix to the real problem. And saying "No hard drive failure yet!", isn't anything to brag about. If you're the server administrator, it's up to you to make sure they DON'T fail, especially for a very poor reason like this.

Not a company, a school; money's tight! It's not my co-worker's responsibility; they did us a favour (they were just on tables before, taking up a lot of room).

It's only a slight movement; of course if there was any hint that they would fall we would do something about it. My concern was simply about the wobbly movement when touched and if this would affect the hard drives.

Well, turns out a drive has gone! I read the SMART data before the new rack and it did have some bad sectors so I'm not sure I purely blame the rack! There are about 40 other drives that are doing well :)

One option would be to get some simple turnbuckle braces at a hardware store and cross brace the heck out of that puppy.

Here's a picture of what I'm talking about.