The T-Systems guys were pretty quick! I didn’t expect them to show up this week, but they did. Kudos!
Anyways, the server room is finally plugged to the local central switch. It is not online yet, T-Systems will have to go through yet another buerocratic procedure prior to setting up the line. But, the hard work is done and all I need now is an electricity revision and the T-Systems green light.
We finally got to the first stage of installing and prepping the server room this weekend. The first stage was to get electricity to the computers. The problem with this is, firstly, the power drain, then the network connection. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any other choice but to place the server with the DAS and the render slaves in a storage room, located on the ground floor in the building my studio is placed in (former flat). The room is great since the server and the running machines don’t bother anybody, but, it’s not properly air conditioned, it didn’t have any electricity power (except for the light) and it wasn’t connected or even remotely being able to be connected to the LAN switch.
After spending the whole day with the most awesome phone on the market (all right, a bit biased here, but I’m really loving it! 
), tweaking the shit out of it, installing gazillion apps and customizing it exactly to my liking, what has the experience been like?
I’ve finally found some spare time to dive into the server installation. I’ve chosen, after a bit of an evaluation, Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard (couldn’t have chosen Linux for several reasons and this version of Windows was the best choice). However, the installation process isn’t as easy and boring as it is on any regular PC, the server is a bit of a proprietary mash of partly commercially available parts and thus requires a little bit more elaborate approach.
The very first time I booted up the server I had to flash and update its SYSTEM and the PERC BIOSes at first, because they were of a bit older version that wasn’t officially supported by Dell.
I find myself constantly copying paths from one place and pasting them in another place. Be it texture source folders, render paths, script locations etc… The problem comes in a networked environment, which is a common thing nowdays, isn’t it 
I usually map a network drive to the most common remote locations and use one of the last letters to label the drive, like X: or W:. This is all fine and it saves a lot of trouble when constantly jumping from one folder to the other on the company’s intranet.