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Admin
Admin
Sounds like Hubert was lucky not to get eaten by a grue.
Admin
I would have gone with Morgan Freeman.
Admin
FTFY!
Admin
Admin
This is when you just unplug all the servers and leave them off until you get some damn UPS's.
Admin
I know my router at home (at least the one supplied by the cable company) has a battery pack to provide it with a few hours of life in case the power goes out.
Why I'd need internet when the power is out is beyond me though...
Admin
Where did Hubert got his degree of common sense? I know many whom I would love to enroll.
Admin
I once worked at a place where a glorified store cupboard was used as a server room. Not so bad when you've got one or two small units; not so good when you've expanded to a 42U rack packed full of high density stuff (blades, SANs etc) without considering associated infrastructure upgrades.
Temperatures regularly hovered in the 25-30C range, but one weekend the room's single puny air conditioning unit finally packed up. No environmental monitoring or alerts were in place, but fortunately most of the hardware was smart enough to turn itself off as temperatures skyrocketed and before too much damage was done, but by the time people arrived on Monday morning the (also woefully inadequate) UPS batteries had literally melted. Cue sudden availability of budget for investment in more suitable UPS system and air conditioning...
Admin
So he's new to the company and knows the server room is full of WTF. The first time there is an outage, he sends requests for new UPSs.
The real what the fuck is dude not diagramming (even mentally) the existing UPS layout the first time there was an issue. He would have found the problem then.
Admin
No, you plug UPS 1 into one outlet in the wall, and then you plug UPS 2 into the other outlet in the wall on a different circuit. If you don't have that, then your wiring is TRWTF.
Admin
FTFY.
Admin
Did someone page me?
My basic rule on this: If your cabling resembles in any way a likeness of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you have a problem.
Admin
Personally, I'd go with William Hootkins.
Admin
It's probably in case you want to use your VoIP phones in the event of a power outage (something that wired POTS phones can do).
Admin
Wrong.
I'm a EE that got into IT stuff a long time ago. I heard that same thing from UAW guys. "We can't let an outside vendor come in a work on the server room power, they might not do a good job like we do." We had tons of power problems in that server room, ended up that they had about have of the grounds and neutrals reversed in the room. One PDU was showing 7 amps of ground current, and they didn't think this was an issue.
Admin
Ha, ha, ha, ha, funny. So funny, in fact, that I posted it myself about an hour before you.
Admin
10 Plug UPS into wall 20 Plug new UPS into old UPS 30 If no flames shoot out, then 20 ELSE 40 40 Unplug newest UPS 50 Plug servers in wherever you can find an opening
Admin
Admin
TRWTF is UPS. Should have used FedEx.
Admin
Admin
[quote user="hoodaticus"][quote user="EatenByAGrue"]The Flying Spaghetti Monster is a myth. The real creator is the Giant Flatulating Raccoon.[/quote]
The Giant Flatuating Raccon was just the foreman on the job. The architect and oversear was the Invisible Pink Unicorn.
Admin
How the hell did the powers that be in that company think their servers were run? Magic pixi dust? They ignored requests for new equipment twice, both times after major problems knocked out the servers. They obviously don't care (or really do think the servers are run using magic pixi dust), since they allowed that horrible configuration in the first place, and they didn't care to fix it when the sh*t hit the fan.
I wouldn't be surprised if the PSN and Amazon AWS outages are due to a similar issue...
Admin
The motto that should apply here is: "Neat wiring doesn't fail". The implication of this is that if it DID fail, it wasn't neat.
Words to live by! Unfortunately not many people do!
Admin
No, stupid, we don't "somehow manage to stumble across this link", we look at the source of the page, and laugh and laugh and laugh at gay how you must be for including rainbows and unicorns in each and every one of your posts.
Admin
Sheesh! Everyone knows that there is no such thing as magic pixie dust... Obviously they're powered by rainbows, good intentions, mouse farts, Obama and unicorn droppings. Oh, and of course essence of Giant Flatulating Racoon.
Admin
Great story. On this final point, I have to feel for the low-tech on the totem pole, whose job otherwise probably is getting workers get back to business as quickly and effortlessly to the end users as possible. If your tape changing guy isn't empowered to say "No" to the VP of the local office (or whoever railroaded his hothouse flowers into the server room) then it's an organizational-behavior issue, not the person.
If the person volunteered to let them in, that's different.
Admin
What, was that bad? Should I not have done that?
I thought there may be a problem when they started making grill-cheese sandwiches with the George Foreman grill.
Admin
He should have just thrown out the UPSes in the first place ;) At least then it's not a question of "if" things break, but "when" :D
Admin
Admin
Thanks for the tip.
decet - that was a decet tip indeed.
Admin
plug ups output to ups input. heureka, perpetum mobile has been invented!
Admin
Who told you that?! That was supposed to be a secret!
Now everyone will have an endless source of power at their finger tips...
Admin
It's like finding a piece of corn in a dog turd.
Admin
So that your phone will work (when you're using the IP phone over your cable line, that is).
Admin
Sadly I'm pretty certain that this one is true. I recognise the events and they match what I recall of both incidents almost exactly. Names changed and other details obfuscated, of course.
Moral of the story is: always insist that the IT guys spec and sanity check the UPS.
Admin
They would also be the people coming back to "fix" it, so they'd get to bill some more hours. So clearly, it wasn't an issue for them.
Admin
Admin
Admin
Oh come on. This is a myth, perpetuated by UPS manufacturers.
If you want an endless source of energy, we all know you need a Minato Motor.
http://www.rexresearch.com/minato/minato.htm
Admin
Admin
Does your cable provider provide you with phone service as well? That would be a likely reason for battery backup of the router.
Admin
Not only wiring. Neat code is often equally trouble-free for similar reasons.
"If you don't understand what you're doing, do it neatly."
Admin
They used a George Foreman grill? That equipment is totally unauthorised! They should have been using the top of the server casings which are running lovely and hot now, thank you very much ...
... we know a TDWTF about that, don't we, children?
Admin
Who's it made by? I wouldn't mind having that sort of network gear. Mine're currently UPSed, but the difference in runtime with them plugged in vs the runtime with the UPS not powering anything except it's status LED and monitoring circuit make me think most of the battery is being wasted before doing anything to keep my netbook online.
Admin
Admin
Of course the servers are powered by magic PXE dust! All the servers that I've worked on have had the setting for years! (You might need to enable PoE first, though :)
Admin
More to the point: "If other people won't understand what you did, do it neatly"
Admin
You're obviously an electrician... And you obviously think you're the best thing ever.
Newsflash: There are SHITE electricians out there, and many good IT people can spot them. For example, the moron electrician that did some work at the school I worked for. The dangerous/illegal state he left things in would have gone undetected if he'd cabled the data to the right cabinet. Instead, I had to go looking, and noticed the Cat6 cable twisting it's way around the 240V power cabling inside the new wall.
This isn't a one off. I also discovered the computer room at said school had it's power points running via some re-purposed light switches. 10A switches running 10x10A power points with a 16A breaker per circuit... Which part of fire-hazard did this electrician not think of?
Edit: And yes, I reported both issues. The light switch thing was removed, and I refused to even attempt to work around the data cabling being sent to the wrong cabinet because of the danger the power/data mix would cause.
Admin
Let's build UPS centipede.