“Fun” with electricity.

Well, this afternoon was “fun” at work.

It was just before 4pm when I decided to plug one of the two power inputs on our main server, a Sun E250, into a new UPS we’ve bought for it. I checked the server’s status lights to make sure that there weren’t any problems and that it was running on both power inputs. So, I pulled the top cable out… and the server switched off. Oblocks!

Anyway, seeing as the server was down anyway, I transfered all the external disks onto the UPS and powered up. Everything seemed to boot up ok, so at 4:10pm I went off to get some tea. While drinking my tea a user came over and told me of a problem he was having. One of our hosts, and only one, was being denied access to all NFS exported filesystems. As far as I could tell, the only way to try to fix it meant rebooting the server again. That fixed it, so I left the room.

As I left I switched off the lights and suddenly the new UPS started beeping, so I turned around, turned the lights back on and went over to have a look. The power had tripped on one of the circuits in the machine room. It had taken out a few of the servers and all the network kit (I’ve not yet installed the UPS for the networking kit as I need some rails for the rack). Oblocks!

Now I had another problem, the trip switch is in a locked electrical cabinet, it’s 5:08pm and the only person with access to the electrical cabinet key has gone home. I had to break into the cabinet, reset the trip and then get all the equipment back on-line.

It was a complete pain.

It was 20 years ago today….

On this day in history:

My Sinclair QL was purchased from Boots in Bedford on this day in 1986.

I remember that on the way home we stopped off at my Nan’s house in Riseley, where I opened the box for the first time, took out the manual folder and the manual pages, which were separately wrapped in film, and put the pages in the manual.

So, why is this momentous?

Well, it was the machine which got me into serious programming. I taught myself 68000 assembler on it, I wrote programs to help me with my degree coursework, I wrote my field mapping project on it, I learnt C on it and it was the ideal development platform for the robotics coursework for my MSc. But above all, it was one of the biggest reasons that Robert Newson and myself became friends.

As it happens, I was trawling Google looking for QL stuff as an amusement and saw that Robert was active on the QL-users mailing list. So, he’s still active in some areas of computing, as well as tweaking Bullet now and again.