I had a call Sunday night reporting that some of the Internet servers at work were unreachable. We assumed that the storm had knocked out the power and the UPSes hadn’t done their job (or the power was out for too long). The site manager was unavailable so we had no other choice than to go in early the next morning, which we assumed would involve a quick power cycle or whatever.
It turned out that the storm had actually knocked out the air conditionong in one of the server rooms and for some reason the temperature alarms hadn’t worked. I’m told (by someone who arrive a bit before me and started opening doors and windows) that the thermometer read over 50 degrees Celcius. Some of the servers had detected the heat and shut themselves down (I think this happens around 70 degrees Celcius inside the computer). Some devices weren’t so clever and just stayed on, getting hotter and hotter.
So, rather than 10 minutes, we spent 2 hours waiting for things too cool enough to operate reliably. The air conditioning had died and we were awaiting an engineer for that, so we just had electric fans and windows. The heat was unbearable, in fact the wooden door frame was too hot to touch on first arrival.
That’s it. That’s the story. Sorry. No amusing punchline or “clever” observation.
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