Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bu.edu!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!news.funet.fi!tukki.jyu.fi!jyu.fi!otto From: otto@tukki.jyu.fi (Otto J. Makela) Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386 Subject: UPS story (Was Re: Cheap or free auto-shutdown setup) Message-ID: Date: 5 Oct 90 11:22:42 GMT References: <1990Sep29.220137.6550@intek01.uucp-> <1030@bilver.UUCP> <257@bongo.UUCP> <80@comix.UUCP> Sender: news@tukki.jyu.fi (News articles) Organization: Turing Police, Criminal AI section Lines: 38 In-Reply-To: jeffl@comix.UUCP's message of 4 Oct 90 08:52:23 GMT In article <80@comix.UUCP> jeffl@comix.UUCP (Jeff Liebermann) writes: [Horror story what happened to computers during earthquake...] 1. The power died about 20 seconds after the quake started. During these 15 seconds, the power was there but oscillating wildly. Most UPS's did NOT activate during this time. The high frequency trash went straight thru the UPS, filters, surge protectors, switching power supplies, and ended up causing 2 hard disk controller cards to lose step and eat the data on the hard disk. [...] Last summer, I was working at my desk during a heavy rainstorm. Suddenly I hear this beep-beep-beep, which turned out to be coming from our UPS on our main 386Unix machine. The power seemed to be good, all the other machines worked normally, but the UPS had switched to internal power. Mysterious, I thought. As I was walking back to my desk, I noticed this big truck with thick cables coming out was parked in front of our office. The cables went down to our cellar, and there were lots of these guys in Electric Company overalls running around, looking rather frantic. Turns out that the heavy rainfall had flooded a 20kV line below the street, and they were trying to stop the flooding to get to the lines. This was made difficult by all the special effects the drenched connectors were giving out :-) Turns out that the truck was a generator, and they were keeping the local grid up with it! Only the UPS seemed to notice that it wasn't the "normal" type of electricity that it was getting from the grid. I told everyone to shut down (because the electricity people told me they COULD lose power any minute), but after about a half hour they got the flooding under control and were able to restore normal power to the grid. In this case, the UPS was a bit over-sensitive. Then again, the requirements for electrical systems in Finland are VERY strict in comparison with the USA. Also, Finland is not exactly an active earthquake area. -- /* * * Otto J. Makela * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * */ /* Phone: +358 41 613 847, BBS: +358 41 211 562 (CCITT, Bell 24/12/300) */ /* Mail: Kauppakatu 1 B 18, SF-40100 Jyvaskyla, Finland, EUROPE */ /* * * Computers Rule 01001111 01001011 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * */