Tag: work

Blast from the past

Wow. We just turned back on a website account for a customer whose domain was “hijacked” a year ago (IIRC he didn’t renew on time, and someone snatched it up). Apparently he gave up trying to get it back, because he asked us to set it up under a new domain name.

We hadn’t moved the files at all, so all we had to do was change the name in our config. (And fix an error in a CGI script that probably relates to a Perl upgrade, since it presumably worked before.) But the site…

Let me just say it was already old before he lost the domain name. It probably looked old in 1999. Everything’s centered, it’s got blink tags, animated GIFs, a clock and a Java-based music player.

But the thing that caught my attention was the “Netscape Now! 3.0” button.

(Netscape 3 came out in 1996. Windows 95 was still new, IE was barely usable at its own version 3, NCSA was still working on Mosaic and Netscape was still charging money for its browser.)

Current Mood: 🤔nostalgic

A ton of batteries

My boss and I just finished installing 1300 pounds of extra batteries for our server room’s UPS* units, more than doubling our previous backup coverage.

See, the power company has decided they need to cut power to our block for 8 hours tomorrow night in order to do work on the local grid. And here we were with only enough battery power for 2½-3 hours. (This was more than enough back in the era of rolling blackouts, since those only lasted an hour or so.) We can shut down everything on the inside network, no problem… but a five-hour outage for all the websites, email accounts, dialups, DSL accounts, etc. that we host is not something we want to be stuck with.

So we got more batteries.

We’ll still have to be here at least part of the time tomorrow night, keeping an eye on things, turning off internal systems to conserve power, etc. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that.

* That’s uninterruptable power supply, not united parcel service.

Nanofire

A bit of excitement at work today. There was a small electrical fire over the weekend. Fortunately someone was working on Saturday, noticed one of the servers wasn’t responding, went into the server room and saw the plug on a heavy-duty extension cord glowing slightly, with smoke coming out. He unplugged it from the wall, made sure it went out, then rearranged some power cords so he could get back to work.

We’ve bypassed the UPS involved until we can be absolutely sure that (a) it didn’t cause the short and (b) it wasn’t damaged. There’s charring on the outside of the plug where it was in contact with the extension cord, though nothing like what we found inside the other plug. The hot wire had burned clean through, leaving charcoal dust all over the inside of the plug. The cable and the circuit breaker are both rated for 20 amps, so the most likely explanation (since the UPS wasn’t belching flames) is that the cable was faulty – and an extension cord is a lot easier to replace than a 130-lb power supply!