Many years ago I was out of the country turning up a new site. Along with racks of servers we had a pair of cabinets shipped to us that contained Cisco 6509s, patch panels, with 300+ ports pre-mounted, pre-cabled, and tested from our main US site. This was a weeks long project and we were a couple of days from being completely done and going home, and the site was already taking some customer traffic. The company CEO stops by to check things out, barely looks at one of the 6509s and says “that’s mounted wrong”. We never noticed it, the group that originally racked it never noticed it, but indeed the rear of the 6509’s shelf was one bolt position too low. Not a RU low, just a half inch.
Some people strive for perfection, some people strive for done is good enough. Word came down we had to fix it. This would entail draining all the customer traffic (an 8-12 hour wait itself), unplug all 336 patch cables, fibers, de-rack the 6500, fix the shelf, and reinstall everything. This would have added a day to our trip at the least, provided nothing else went wrong in the process. My manager and I decided to take matters into our own hands.
We went out to our rental cars and got our jacks for changing flat tires. We stuck them under the back of the 6509, gently lifted up the chassis enough to unscrew and fix the supporting shelf (the chassis rack ears were still secure to the rack), and let it back down. While it was serving customer traffic. Problem was solved within an hour, we were very happy with ourselves.
Needless to say our bosses were not happy about our bit of improvisation. But it worked and not a packet was lost that day!
