DCM-1188: decommission of hesper-01, done as written

Work order DCM-1188 · Site fen, rows 9 · Crew two operators, contract (not client staff) · Duration 1 day, 6.5 billable hours Result complete; one manifest note

Client paperwork says: remove hesper-01 (192.0.2.31, row 9 rack 4, U21, serial SM-2U-402277, commissioned 2019-08-30), secure-erase drives, return chassis, dispose media per certificate. The node has been standby since a failover; the client's runbook HES-04 updates the topology record during the failover itself, so by my start the register is the client's problem and the rack unit is mine.

Checklist

08:10 Arrival with client escort. Confirm node by link lights before anything else; we have pulled live nodes twice in eleven years, once at a site that is now this site's client. hesper-01 is dark, standby per the client's label. hesper-03, two racks away, is primary and its array light is green.

08:26 PDU drop, U21, rack 9-4. While the tail harness is loose I do the thing every contractor does and read the adjacent positions. U20: blank. U22: patch panel, no copper. This matches the client's August review, pinned in the site channel, which asked my company for nothing: found the U-positions either side of where it should be occupied by a patch panel and a blank. I was not asked to check this. I checked because row 9 rack 4 had a free U and my supervisor will not approve a second day. There is nothing there. The blank has been painted over once, the way blanks are when a row gets repainted.

09:02 Drives out. Eight. Serials recorded, wiped in the client's wipe bay, one certificate per drive. All eight completed, no reallocation warnings. One certificate has a timestamp of 2019-06-17. The wiper logs the date from the host, not the drive, and the bay takes its date off the site's old NTP box, which the client knows about and has ticketed. Noted on the manifest. It is a wrong date, not a wrong event.

11:40 Asset tag. Sticker peels to return to the client's inventory pool, per contract. Under the 2019 sticker is the sticker from under it, factory adhesive, older, batch format SM-2U-44xxxx. The number is 441901.

Both stickers went in the evidence envelope. Here is why that is a manifest note and not just a sticker: the client's asset register, which is public to contractors during a decom so we cannot swap chassis, lists the corvid config-store pair at serials SM-2U-441902 and SM-2U-441903, procured 2021-04-06, racked in row 4. hesper-01 was commissioned 2019-08-30. The chassis I hauled down had a 2021 batch serial under a 2019 sticker. 441901 is a number that exists and should have been racked somewhere. Row 4 or row 9, I do not know; that is your register, and your register already has a name in it with no serial at all (stories/quorum). The reconciler wants to add the row every night and your people have stopped closing it (stories/inventory-diff). I merged nothing and closed nothing; I do not have repo rights and don't want them.

14:15 Chassis on pallet. Cabinet inventory check per DCM procedure: two spares HES-BBU-02 present, one 2019 batch, one newer, per the client's cabinet list and the July ticket where your people argued about which one was in which machine (stories/correspondence). Both present. I did not open the ticket's photo; it is not my photo. The newer spare's label is smudged where a label was lifted from it. I am recording labels, not opinions.

15:40 Manifest filed with client portal. Register update marked forfeit to client. Site left with rack 9-4 U21 empty, blanks not installed because blanks are a second work order.

One thing I want changed in the contract

The wipe bay's date bug is ticketed, fine. But the bay keys each certificate to the drive serial the bay reads, and on one certificate the serial field is empty with no error, and the certificate still completed. Empty is not an error in that bay's schema, so the paper is clean and the number is missing. If a certificate with no serial says the media is destroyed, do not ask me. Ask your bay.

Invoice references DCM-1188. Blank panel for U21 quoted separately.

— dcm-crew-217, sub, tag on the bay door

Related: quorum, inventory-diff, correspondence, runbook-failover-hesper, index.