[tech] the aftermath

[Bernard Blackham]

So around 9:44 am this morning, the power at UCC (and presumably
most of campus went down). It came back about 9:49 am but with some
vengeance... The flaky power froze the Cisco and the DECServer,
powered down hydra, and frazzled meito's PSU and MB. All just needed
some bouncing except meito...

Skipping over the long and convoluted story, meito had it's drives
transplanted to a new motherboard & CPU (mine) and seems to be
running a little faster (IDE speed). The new CPU is a P3-450. The
only downside is that there's no facility in the BIOS to tell it to
switch on when it powers up - so it'll stay off in a power failure.
But we're looking to fix that with a small circuit.

At certain points during the day it was feared that both meito's
disks had died horrible deaths, which proved quite distressing
without a backup. (Even RAID1 wasn't enough to save them). Turns out
it was the motherboards' at fault, but it still raises the question
of backups at UCC... do we need a plan?

I know some things get copied around at sporadic intervals, but
should we have something more concrete?

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham 
 bernard at blackham dot com dot au