• Steve Parker (unregistered)

    Within the first year at his job, Hubert configured his servers to communicate with the UPS and (a) log the power failure and (b) shut down cleanly.

    Hubert also took a few days of his first 12 months in the computer room, going over the racking and cabling of his servers. Because of the redundant power supplies, Hubert was able to fix any power cabling errors without downtime (though he scheduled downtime just to be on the safe side).

    Hubert kept his job.

  • Naresh Kookaburra (unregistered) in reply to alegr
    alegr:
    Let's build UPS centipede.

    You win!

  • Thomas (unregistered) in reply to frist
    frist:
    J Cooper:
    Ok, so, isn't TRWTF this:

    "Hubert stumbled to the server room in the dark, guided only by the blinking lights of WiFi routers scattered throughout the building"......

    Wait, so the power is out, but the wifi routers are on? HTF? Were they powered by 9V batteries wired in series or something?

    power over Ethernet? (presumably from a switch inside the server room)

    Either that or their was still some charge left in the capacitors.

  • Design Pattern (unregistered) in reply to ÃÆâ€â„Â
    ÃÆâ€â„Â:
    I wouldn't be surprised if the PSN and Amazon AWS outages are due to a similar issue...
    But Amazon promised 99.95% uptime!

    That's so reliable that some people put their life other peoples lifes at stake!

    And now you know what TRWTF is...

  • Rhialto (unregistered) in reply to Satanicpuppy
    Satanicpuppy:
    THERMAL WARNING. One of the batteries must have caught fire or something! I slammed the pedal to the floor, and tried to keep from hyperventilating.
    That would be the time to remotely trigger the halon system. Any BOFH would know that.
  • J Cooper (unregistered) in reply to frist

    But.... but............ if the reason for him being there is the server room didn't have any power........................

    [brainsplosion]

    What the hell am I missing here?

  • (cs) in reply to Zapp Brannigan
    Zapp Brannigan:
    Whoa, whoa, just be careful you don't feed the supplies into each other because you might create some kind of perpetual motion machine. Our corporate policy is to obey all the laws of thermodynamics.
    I have no Entropy for Hubert.
  • Prinny (unregistered)

    I would assume someone from management one day came down, saw the ups batteries and thought they could double up as power strips, thus saving the company money from wasting dollars in the server room where no one important would ever be.

  • Calli Arcale (unregistered) in reply to ted
    ted:
    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.

    You're assuming the UPS layout was the same before and after the replacement. I wouldn't make that assumption, personally. It's quite possible it was a sane setup before (just underpowered) and the people assigned to plug in the new UPSes didn't know what they were doing and didn't pay attention to the setup of the UPSes that they were removing.

    Also, I can forgive Hubert the naivety of assuming that whoever installed new UPSes would have a clue how to do their actual job. It does take a few years in industry before one gets that optimism beaten out of them.

  • Niten (unregistered) in reply to Satanicpuppy

    That is win. You were lucky to have someone who believed you. After hanging out on this site, you begin to fear that managerial ineptitude in the face of disaster is the norm.

  • Gondolf (unregistered)

    We read your effin' source, Remy! Not hard to find the only link in a 5000 byte article.

    ratis: ratis 5 stars or else!

  • anon (unregistered)

    Hmm...Perhaps a program that instead of garbage out, when fed garbage in would produce electricity. Then you could plug the UPS into that. It's not perpetual motion - it would definitely need a steady stream of erroneous user input to keep going. No soortage there.

  • (cs) in reply to nonpartisan
    nonpartisan:
    TRWTF is top men. If you want this handled, get a top woman.

    I like a women on top as much as the next guy, but how is that going to help the problem in this article?

  • Jeremy Friesner (unregistered) in reply to J Cooper
    J Cooper:
    Wait, so the power is out, but the wifi routers are on? HTF? Were they powered by 9V batteries wired in series or something?

    Other UPS's, perhaps?

  • illtiz (unregistered)

    Remy: The reason for us seeing the cornify link is that we read the damn source of each of your articles.

  • imMute (unregistered) in reply to Satanicpuppy
    Satanicpuppy:
    Every wall outlet in the server room runs to a huge battery backup that can handle everything for about 15 hours.

    Uhh.. Do you have a fricken WAREHOUSE full of batteries? Battery backup is supposed to last long enough to either let the servers gracefully shutdown, or for the generator to spin up. Having a DC that is backed up fully by batteries is impossible (because no UPS vendor sells shit that big (because thats not what they're for)).

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    i remember a story where UPS#1 was plugged into UPS#2 and UPS#2 was plugged into UPS#1! that ruined the batteries long before the first real outage.

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