Visiting your hardware
Yes, you can come and see it. It takes arranging, and nine times out of ten the thing you came to do could have been done without you.
How it is arranged
Access to the facilities is controlled and logged, and visits are arranged in advance through support. We need:
- Who is coming — full name, and they must be an authorised contact on the account or named by one
- When, with a window rather than “sometime Tuesday”
- What you intend to do
- Whether you are bringing or removing hardware
Bring photo identification. Access is logged, as it is for everyone including us, and a visitor who turns up unannounced is not getting in — that is the point of the control, and it protects your rack as much as anyone's.
What you can do while you are there
Work on your own equipment in your own rackspace. You cannot touch anybody else's, and for anything involving shared infrastructure — a switch port, a power feed, a cross-connect — one of our engineers does it with you rather than you doing it alone.
If you are bringing hardware in, it has to be agreed beforehand in a ticket; support issues a reference and nothing is accepted without one. The same applies to taking equipment out, with the added requirement that we can confirm you are entitled to remove it. See shipping hardware to us.
Consider whether you need to come
Most reasons people give for a visit have a faster answer:
- “I need to see what it is doing”
- Remote KVM is included on every machine — console, BIOS, power control, from your desk.
- “Something needs reseating”
- Remote hands. Our engineers are already in the building; you would spend a day travelling for five minutes of work.
- “I need to swap a disk”
- If it is our hardware, the spare is on site and we fit it — see hardware failure. If it is yours, leave spares with us and the same applies.
- “I want to check the install is as specified”
- Fair, and photographs plus
dmidecodeandlsblkoutput usually settle it faster.
When a visit does make sense
- Installing hardware you would rather rack yourself the first time
- Work needing specialist equipment or a specific process of yours
- Decommissioning, where you want to take the disks with you — see leaving
- An audit that requires someone to have seen the site
One thing to be clear about
We are a dedicated server provider and an ISP, not the owner of the buildings. The racks are ours and everything in them is run by us, but the facilities are carrier-grade sites we are a tenant in — which is why access runs to their process as well as ours. See why Amsterdam and what we do not offer.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base