Outage

Well, I just had an epic outage yesterday morning.  Around 8am, my 650VA battery backed Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) was … interrupted!  The battery, or something, died on this thing.  It was a no name brand, I guess I got what I paid for.  I’m not sure if I can (or should) fix it.  Needless to say, it brought down my server and my new PC desktop to a halt.  I couldn’t reboot my new server, so I had to take it apart, clean it, and re-assemble it.  I’m glad to say that it’s back up and running, after more than 12 hours of down time.  The most outage I had so far in 2 years.

To ensure my power needs are being met, I went out and got a new UPS.  This time, it’s a whopping 1500VA UPS from Best Buy.  It’s a re-labelled Cyberpower brand, into Geek Squad.  It can  handle a collosal 900 Watts of input, so I should have plenty of head room.  Another nice thing about this power supply is the LCD in front to show me the load and battery condition.   I really don’t need the supplied USB cable and software to monitor the UPS’ condition.

The outage also gave me the opportunity to clean up the tangle of cable mess near my server.  I only have a 15″W by 24″D space to work with, so it’s pretty cramped in there.  It’s like playing a jigsaw puzzle, trying to figure out how the mini-tower server, UPS, subwoofer, and the light fixture fit into the small corner.  After a couple of hours, it’s finally sorted out. Now it looks much tidier.  I still can’t avoid the gazillion cables back there, but I’m managing them using flexible tubes and twist ties.

My wife predicted in a few months, I’ll redo this setup.  I think she may be right.

Tags: cables, hardware, office