I was recently given approval to price out, purchase, build, and configure a “backup server”. Basically it’s all a bunch of newegg equipment in a very large thermaltake case. It ended up being 6.7TB of storage after formatting and RAIDifying the drives. Yay FreeNAS.

As I was busy and my ‘helper monkey’ was not, I had him build the server. He finished the build in about 2 hours – and only asked me a couple questions regarding parts he had never worked with before (like the hot swap drive bays).

He then hands it off to me for the setup/configuration of the server. I plug it in, hook up the monitor and a keyboard, and press the power button. No dice. I check to see that the PSU is fully plugged in and that the switch is on. Still no dice. Open the case, check all the power plugs – they look fine. Look fine. They weren’t fine. I found out that the 8-pin motherboard power is not plugged in. And what is in it’s place? None other than a 6pin PCIe power cable. Uh.

So my ‘helper monkey’ plugged a 6pin cable into an 8pin receiver. Argh. Good thing it didn’t power on.

Switched it out with the 8pin motherboard cable, hook everything back up and viola! It powers on like a champ.

Moral of the story? QC everything.