AG Schnozz wrote:
> Man alive, that sounds almost IDENTICAL to a station in southern
> california. Identical situation except the generators all tapped
> from the same fuel-tank. During a generator test, one never did
> shutdown and drained the tank without anybody knowing. Power fails,
> and so did the generators.
When I worked as a Sysadmin (actually, just tape-changing clerk and help
desk really [sigh]) for a Credit Union back in the late 80's, the
Ultimate computer and associated hardware (eg. large disk drives of the
time) were naturally supported by a large chunk of conditioned power,
battery backup, UPS. We were all in the room once, and a Telstra
technician working on the phone system that shared the room managed to
back his arse into the Power BRB (Big Red Button), which cut all power
to the room in an emergency (First rule - BRBs should not bea readily on
display ;) ). The UPS *was* saving us, squealing away to alert us to the
condition (it had enough power to allow us to systematically shut
everything down, something our Ultimate desperately required if it
wasn't to go all to crap on us). However, my "Supervisor", in her panic,
had the "logical" thought of "UPS SCREAMING. STOP IT BY PUTTING IT INTO
BYPASS MODE" which thus sent the then non-existent power to the Ultimate
without going through the UPS. Everything died, and that was a pretty
bad day and night getting it all back.
If I have any point in the above, it's that MTBF can only be estimated
in isolation from the people actually using it (a point AG already has
made). ;-)
Cheers,
Marc (Who *has* busted many other things through momentary stupidity and
anger, the latter perhaps being a subset of the former ;) )
Noosa Heads, Oz
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