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KarenCravens
Karen Cravens

Tue

Mar 20
2007

12:47Z

Storm outage

Happy Kansas spring, everybody... we had a whopper of a lightning storm 
move through early this morning, and we're not quite sure what happened, 
but the UPS apparently decided it wasn't good.  All the PC's (I think) on 
it rebooted, so we were offline for a little while.

I think it was a lightning strike rather than a power outage, since all 
the clocks are happy (that I've noticed so far), but my PC (which isn't on 
the UPS) was also rebooted (which incidentally is running the debug 
version of Firehawk, so even when the server was receiving listmail it was 
just queuing).

The rest of the week is supposed to be like this, but hopefully not so 
RIGHT ON TOP OF OUR HOUSE.

http://www.crh.noaa.gov/forecast/MapClick.php?CityName=Wichita&state=KS&site=ICT
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CarlCravens
Carl D Cravens

Tue

Mar 20
2007

13:39Z

Storm outage

Karen Cravens wrote:
> Happy Kansas spring, everybody... we had a whopper of a lightning storm 
> move through early this morning, and we're not quite sure what happened, 
> but the UPS apparently decided it wasn't good.  All the PC's (I think) on 
> it rebooted, so we were offline for a little while.

Longer than we should have been... our new server apparently thinks that 
the proper thing to do when losing power is to not come back on until 
someone pushes the button.  I gotta figure out if there's a way to 
change that.

Also, the UPS wasn't drained... I can't figure out why all the machines 
rebooted at the same time.  The UPS is several years old, though the 
battery has been replaced once.  Shoot, that thing might be ten years 
old by now.  And the drain guy plugged his snake machine into it a few 
weeks ago (moron).  It's an APC, and it's been solid, but I think maybe 
its time has passed.  I need to see if there's some kind of diagnostic I 
can run, short of unplugging it from the wall to see what happens.
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MikeF
Mike Feldhusen

Tue

Mar 20
2007

13:49Z

Storm outage

> It's an APC, and it's been solid, but I think maybe
> its time has passed.  I need to see if there's some kind of diagnostic I
> can run, short of unplugging it from the wall to see what happens.

You know, the "yank the plug out of the wall" has always been the favorite
diagnostic for UPSes of all the sysadmins I've worked with.

Though they usually send a warning about "UPS Maintenance work" before
hand, just in case.
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CarlCravens
Carl D Cravens

Tue

Mar 20
2007

13:57Z

Storm outage

Michael Feldhusen wrote:
> You know, the "yank the plug out of the wall" has always been the favorite
> diagnostic for UPSes of all the sysadmins I've worked with.
> 
> Though they usually send a warning about "UPS Maintenance work" before
> hand, just in case.

Yeah... it just means shutting down the servers first, on the chance 
that the UPS will fail.  I really don't want them all to go down hard 
again if I can help it.
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KarenCravens
Karen Cravens

Wed

Mar 21
2007

15:54Z

Storm outage

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007, Carl Cravens wrote:

CC>Yeah... it just means shutting down the servers first, on the chance 
CC>that the UPS will fail.  I really don't want them all to go down hard 
CC>again if I can help it.

But then the UPS isn't under load.

(Given the weirdness of the shutdown, and the fact that we had a very 
close if not direct lightning strike, we're still going with the 
"Lightning is just weird" theory.  But we need a UPS for the 
workstations, so we may retire the server UPS to that duty and buy a 
heavier UPS for the servers since there's three of them now:
old+new+test, soon to become main+dev+test.)
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CarlCravens
Carl D Cravens

Wed

Mar 21
2007

18:03Z

Storm outage

Karen Cravens wrote:
> But then the UPS isn't under load.

Didn't say the UPS wouldn't be under load... it just wouldn't be the 
servers.  Turn on the two monitors and that ought to do it.

Speaking of, we're going to take a brief outage this evening for some 
security patches, which will require a reboot.  Probably around 7ish, 
hardly longer than it takes to reboot.

> workstations, so we may retire the server UPS to that duty and buy a 
> heavier UPS for the servers since there's three of them now:
> old+new+test, soon to become main+dev+test.)

We're only running about 75% capacity at peak load.  Though our battery 
runtime prediction is down to 19 minutes.  I wouldn't buy a bigger UPS 
unless we want more battery time.
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