Famous operational issues

Mon Feb 22 17:35:47 UTC 2021

Long ago, in a galaxy far away I worked for a gov't contractor on site
at a gov't site...

We had our own cute little datacenter, and our 4 building complex had
a central power distribution setup from utility -> buildings.
It was really quite nice :) (the job, the buildings, the power and
cute little datacenter)

One fine Tues afternoon ~2pm local time, the building engineers
decided they would make a copy of the key used to turn the main /
utility power off...
Of course they also needed to make sure their copy worked, so... they
put the key in and turned it.

Shockingly, the key worked! and no power was provided to the buildings :(
It was very suddenly very dark and very quiet... (then the yelling started)

Ok, fast forward 7 days... rerun the movie... Yes, the same building
engineers made a new copy, and .. tested that new copy in the same
manner.

For neither of these events did someone tell the rest of us (and our
customers): "Hey, we MAY interrupt power to the buildings... FYI, BTW,
make sure your backups are current..." I recall we got the name of the
engineer the 1st time around, but not the second.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 12:26 PM Tony Finch <dot at dotat.at> wrote:
>
> Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick at ianai.net> wrote:
> >
> >       Me: Did you order that EPO cover?
> >       Her: Nope.
>
> There are apparently two kinds of EPO cover:
>
> - the kind that stops you from pressing the button by mistake;
>
> - and the kind that doesn't, and instead locks the button down to make
> sure it isn't un-pressed until everything is safe.
>
> We had a series of incidents similar to yours, so an EPO cover was
> belatedly installed. We learned about the second kind of EPO cover when a
> colleague proudly demonstrated that the EPO button should no longer be
> pressed by accident, or so he thought.
>
> Tony.
> --
> f.anthony.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/
> the quest for freedom and justice can never end