Stage 9 from yesterday.
Pete sent this link (see below) to me a few weeks ago. I’ve been forwarding it around to a few others that I know since I just did the Echo Triathlon last Saturday. The swim portion of the tri is always the funnest. It’s like WWF swimming in the open water. I keep watching it and keep laughing out loud. It’s just soo funny. Better if you have done a triathlon so you know how true it really is. But funny if you haven’t. Check it out.
Time to go run…
I just saw this on Letterman and laughed so hard I started coughing. Take a gander. 9 minutes. Worthy of laughs.
UPSes are things that I deal with on a daily basis at work. They are the devices that keep my equipment up in case of brief power outages, brown-outs, low voltage coming in from the power company, all of the above.
I have had good luck with the APC 3000RMXL over the years. It’s a 3U rack mount UPS with expandability, swappable backplates (so you can outfit it with a 20 or 30amp receptacle instead of the default 15amp ones), and also lets you daisy chain it with battery units to extend the lifetime. It’s heavy, but has good reliability.
One of the issues I’ve come to notice is with my Spam Database server. This is a 3U 24drive SAS machine with dual power supplies and wants gobs of power. I have my database server plugged into different APC power strips (that let me remote control the status of the port.. on, off, etc) which are fed by different APC UPSes on different circuits. At times during brief power outages, the database server reboots. I’ve come to figure out it was during the time of brief outages. You’d think my “Uninterruptible” device would mean “Uninterrupted” power to my devices to which it powers. Unfortunately, this is not the case. According to APC’s website , there is a transfer time of 2 to 4ms between the time it takes to get power switched over to the battery on utility failure. Typically, this is enough time for the capacitors on my power supplies to handle the brief interruption. However, in the case of this database server, I’ve found that it’s not good enough. I needed a UPS that was ALWAYS ‘on-line’.
Some google searches later and I found out about Minuteman UPS. Pretty good priced UPSes that offer a “always on” solution. APC does not have any that I can find in the “SmartUPS” line. I ended up getting a Endeavor ED1500RM2U to power a single power supply to my database server. This should fix any of the issues that i’ve had with my database server rebooting during brown-outs… I hope. I’ve installed it over a month ago and no issues since. Here’s hoping that it’ll fix the issue for good.
So here’s hoping that APC might offer an ‘online’ edition to their SmartUPS line. 2-4ms just didn’t cut it in this case.
