m13b.net

Yesterday afternoon, a strong thunderstorm rolled through the area where I work, and of course, knocked the power out. This came as little surprise to me, as our connection to the local electrical utility has always been rather frail.

Luckily, the majority of the servers were shut down gracefully. I say the majority, because one of the six UPS boxes we use didn’t hold its charge. So that’s one piece of hardware I’ll have to replace. The office closed early as a result, but I knew that I’d have to come in early today to assess any further damage and get things back online.

So that’s what I did. Rolled in at around 6AM, and got all of the servers back up. So far, so good. Unfortunately, when I went down to the first floor, none of the VoIP phones had any power, and on the third floor, no one had any phone service.

Went to check the switch, and it was dead. No ethernet, no PoE. I had some older non-PoE switches, so I was able to get everything back on the ethernet—including phone service—but without PoE to power them, the phones on the first floor are worthless. I called our phone vendor, who said that the switch only had a 90 day warranty and that they’d have to order and configure another.

These damned things were new as of last November, but that’s not even the real kicker here. When I left the office late yesterday afternoon, the switch was up and running and the storm had passed. The switch is on a UPS with the rest of our telco equipment, so I was able to make calls over it yesterday once the power had gone out. So somewhere between the time that I left the office to when I returned early this morning, the switch called it quits.

Thankfully, that’s the worst of the damage. *knocks wood* We should have a replacement here early next week, and everyone will be back up and running again. In the meantime, they can use their cellphones or run up to the third floor if they need to call someone.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 9:33 am and is filed under Ramblings.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.