Time has slipped by and I realize it's been about a week since our last posting. Wow! That indicates how quickly life can move, even here in a corner of the world with little traffic passing by and little news of what's happening in the outside world.
Had a funny experience this morning, at least I think it is.
While our electricity is provided by an area hydro-electric plant (not part of our operation), it isn't really reliable. Voltage can spike to 400V (normally 220V) such that most appliances need to be plugged into surge suppressors when operational, most wall sockets have built-in on/off switches but we normally just unplug everything not in use.
The center also has two generators that kick on normally within 15 seconds of losing power from the hydro-electric plant. Each supports half of the Center, for everything at work and in home. They sometimes run reliably for hours. Of course, sometimes they need to be taken off-line for maintenance which leaves us vulnerable to area power loses.
Another approach to protect equipment and keep it running when all else fails is the use of small battery backup systems, also called Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS). Our department has done quite a bit of work placing many of these around the Center and plugging in network equipment (switches, wireless equipment, etc) so that it will all keep working through all the short and longer power hiccups. That allows people with laptops (which have their own batteries) to continue working through a power outage.
When power drops, a battery backup starts beeping to signal that you're running on battery alone and that, when the battery runs down, you're outta luck.
So, one of the generators was being worked on today and kept going off, then on, then off, all day long. The IT department has alarms setup that alert us at our desks whenever any piece of our equipment has problems so that we can get to it, sometimes even before the users realize there's a problem.
So I got an alarm at my desk about a network switch going down. Since I know it's powered by a backup battery system, I believe it's not because of the generator just having gone off line. I felt I better hustle over to the office where this equipment is and do some troubleshooting.
I walk into the office where I'm greeted by a dark room (no lights) full of people sitting around drinking tea and coffee, waiting for power to be restored. When I announced I was here to check out why our equipment wasn't working, they simply said "we turned the battery backup off because it was beeping."
We put all these fancy systems in place to keep our equipment running, respond to the alarms to keep the users happy, and they disable it all.
Go figure.
Actually, the IT manager and I thought it was pretty funny.
.
Had a funny experience this morning, at least I think it is.
While our electricity is provided by an area hydro-electric plant (not part of our operation), it isn't really reliable. Voltage can spike to 400V (normally 220V) such that most appliances need to be plugged into surge suppressors when operational, most wall sockets have built-in on/off switches but we normally just unplug everything not in use.
The center also has two generators that kick on normally within 15 seconds of losing power from the hydro-electric plant. Each supports half of the Center, for everything at work and in home. They sometimes run reliably for hours. Of course, sometimes they need to be taken off-line for maintenance which leaves us vulnerable to area power loses.
Another approach to protect equipment and keep it running when all else fails is the use of small battery backup systems, also called Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS). Our department has done quite a bit of work placing many of these around the Center and plugging in network equipment (switches, wireless equipment, etc) so that it will all keep working through all the short and longer power hiccups. That allows people with laptops (which have their own batteries) to continue working through a power outage.
When power drops, a battery backup starts beeping to signal that you're running on battery alone and that, when the battery runs down, you're outta luck.
So, one of the generators was being worked on today and kept going off, then on, then off, all day long. The IT department has alarms setup that alert us at our desks whenever any piece of our equipment has problems so that we can get to it, sometimes even before the users realize there's a problem.
So I got an alarm at my desk about a network switch going down. Since I know it's powered by a backup battery system, I believe it's not because of the generator just having gone off line. I felt I better hustle over to the office where this equipment is and do some troubleshooting.
I walk into the office where I'm greeted by a dark room (no lights) full of people sitting around drinking tea and coffee, waiting for power to be restored. When I announced I was here to check out why our equipment wasn't working, they simply said "we turned the battery backup off because it was beeping."
We put all these fancy systems in place to keep our equipment running, respond to the alarms to keep the users happy, and they disable it all.
Go figure.
Actually, the IT manager and I thought it was pretty funny.
.
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