Ah, the downtime tales I can tell... Back in my not-that-distant past working for a supercomputing center downtime of the machine room was usually caused by one of two problems: 1) lightning strikes taking down the power grid or 2) electricians playing, "Hey this breaker isn't labeled! Let's see what's on it!"
#1 was a problem for a long time because a) there was no generator behind the UPS and b) the bigger Crays didn't fit on the UPS anyway. #2 was just... a problem. Y2K (remember that to-do?) rolled around and generators behind the UPS became a requirement. The bigger Crays weren't an issue anymore. The generators were obtained. The real humor of this is that the auto-start for the generators wasn't installed for almost a year afterwards - until then someone had to push a button to start them. 2.5 years later (& no site-wide downtime) a coworker & I were both attending the a conference across the country. It was the middle of the summer and while talking to coworkers one mentioned a huge mass of thunderstorms rolling through. Not long after we both lost connection to servers in the machine room. We found out later that, yet again, a lightning strike had hit the power grid, and, as always, the UPS swiftly took over. After N minutes the auto-start fired up the generators. However there was never any means installed to get the power from the generators to the UPS & power system, so the site immediately went dark. Did I mention the machine room was in the basement of a company that designed & built nuclear power plants? (I should save this story to get drinks outta it) Moose _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
