On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 10:58:41AM -1000, Paul Graydon wrote: > It's amazing how many of our rails still required screwing into the cab, > even as they took advantage of the square holes.
Yeah; I wouldn't feel comfortable without at least one screw on each side of each rail, and at least one screw per server going through the rackmount ear to secure the server. (I have heard this one called the 'earthquake screw' but the thing I want them for is making sure that when I pull one server, only that one server is pulled. Badness can result otherwise.) My favorite rails are the old-school 3u supermicro rails that came with the 3u 8 bay supermicros. They had these little pegs so you could fit it to the rail and it wouldn't fall while you screwed it in, but you still definitely had to screw it in. The big advantage was that it was trivial to snap off the pegs with pliers and then you could use the same rail on threaded racks. > I still hate rack-nuts, even though I managed to remove and fit about 10 > of them without cutting my self (for once). Thankfully one of the guys > I worked with was enthusiastic about doing them, so I left most of them > to him. I've gotten used to them, I think... it was hard at first, but after so many thousand insertions, callouses develop and thumb strength improves to the point where the insertion tools seem hopelessly slow. When getting out of an old rack, I can remove 3-5 cage nuts at once by pressing with the heel of my palm. But, the interesting thing I've noticed is that some makes of cage nuts are really easy to get in, while others are very difficult. In my toolbox right now I have some cage nuts ordered in packs of 1000 from a random ebay vendor that have fairly stiff cages. It takes a fair bit of force to insert or remove. I also have some cagenuts I sourced locally from Central Computer. While these are pricey ($20 for a pack of 50 nuts and screws) the nuts from central computer have a 'cage' made out of a thinner Gage metal; they require much less force to insert or remove. The nuts are otherwise completely compatible; both are standard m6 cage nuts, and they are completely interchangeable. The lighter-Gage nuts 'jump out' of the square hole more often, but it's still a rare enough problem that it's largely ignorable. Just saying, switching to another make of cage nut can make things a lot easier on thumbs that don't do this sort of thing often. The problem is that none of the cage nut vendors I've seen list the Gage of the sheetmetal used in the 'cage' assembly, so it's luck of the draw what you get. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
