Friday, August 24, 2007 1:10 AM
our tale begins with a hot and muggy morning at 8am as i leave my house for work. it was a hot night, so i drove to work with my window down. after parking, i roll my window up part way and walk inside. then suddenly, around 10am, i hear a rumble. i ask my co-workers if that was thunder and after a quick check of the radar, yes, something was a-brewin'. i head out to my car and roll up the old window, and grab my little point and shoot camera, and what did i see when walking back inside? yes, dark and gloomy skies.
then comes the rain. oh and there was lots of it. and the lightning. the radar wasn't looking great either.
and then, all hell breaks loose...
first the power goes out (well, partly)
then we discover a leak in our conference room. nothing a little packing tape can't solve...
then penelec says we won't have full power until 1:11pm (not 1:05pm or 1:10pm, but rather 1:11pm), but that doesn't solve the issue that our 4 battery backups are running at critical levels trying to keep 5 servers up.
can anyone tell me what happens when you have 5 servers, 2 nas devices, 5 switches, 4 battery backups and several more electronic devices running in a 8ft x 8ft room... with no air conditioning?
and that was a snap early in the day. it hit 84 a few hours later.
so, what happens when only half your office's outlets work, but you've got a full office of people that need to get work done? you improvise. we like to call this setup "ghetto".
first, there was a laptop that was running out of juice and the only available outlet was a surge protector and extension cord away...
then, the it department needs some help with its 3 computers...
for those that can't decipher what's going on there, that's an extension cord (orange) coming in from an outlet in the hall, with a surge protector attached, with 3 more extension cords going from that (gray, black, and creme), which are connected to the battery backups for our computers (which lasted an impressive 54 seconds each).
and remember that wonderful server room with no a/c? well, macgyver would be proud...
yes, those are in fact clip fans attached to our server rack and a cardboard box.
so what did we do in our downtime? we sought out the great pumpkin for advice and gave him a ball as a token of our appreciation: