Date : Fri, 19 Nov 2010 02:30:18 +0100
From : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: [OT] Who'da thought...
On 18/11/2010 18:15, J.G.Harston wrote:
> I had to sellotape the server plug into the wall socket at AFE and hide
> it behind a label saying "DO NOT UNPLUG!!!" in English and Cantonese.
Begs the question - why aren't these things hardwired to the wall. You
know, like electric cookers [*] and such?
You know, you hear about cleaners and such unplugging critical bits of
kit. Saw it myself in a different version. A certain large retail store
had a TTY-like terminal that is not supposed to be unplugged ever.
Cleaner unplugged it, and to make matters worse, plugged her hoover into
the bright red socket mounted at chest height. Lazy cow obviously
couldn't be bothered to bend over to use the white (normal) sockets
along the skirting board. She switched on the vacuum. The red sockets
were all hooked to a large UPS, which immediately panicked (at a sudden
2kW load?) and shut everything down with sirens blaring. And when I say
everything, I mean all the terminals went down, as did the phones, the
printers, the networking kit...
Thankfully the installation was smart enough to run the mini off its own
dedicated UPS. But it too went into panic as the outside world just
"vanished". In addition to which, the tills panicked and locked out
everybody awaiting a clear-through from the mini (not to mention the db
for pricing).
Needless to say, it was a disaster that took a depressingly long time to
fix (they eventually worked out to unplug everything except the comms to
the mini could see head office, then let it report and sync, then add
the terminals, then the printers, and finally the tills (which for some
reason *required* the printers to be on-line to trace each product
beeped)). It became evident that the fail safe methods, didn't.
And it took a lazy cleaner with a big-ass vacuum to <cough> verify
</cough> the system could cope with outages.
[I seem to recall it was a "Charles" (like a blue Henry), but the older
ones appear to be 1200W [via Googleage] which doesn't sound like it
would trip out an on-line UPS capable of handling a large PBX, half a
dozen terminals, networking kit, and many dot-matrixes... maybe it was
"the straw that broke the camel's back"?]
> to use the RISC high-speed duplicating printer (one of these:
> http://www.riso.co.uk/230-fast-laser-printer-riso-product.htm )
Coo.!
> as a photocopier.
Yikes!
Best wishes,
Rick.
* - I know for cookers it is because that sort of load on a plug/socket
arrangement is poor, but the point still holds. It's a bit of kit that
isn't supposed to be unplugged, so why not hardwire it to a wall plate?
--
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...