[tech] UCC Servers + UPS

[David Adam]

On Tue, 21 Jul 2009, Matt Didcoe wrote:
> Given the efforts to upgrade club security of late, I was wondering if
> perhaps we should be putting some more effort into protecting the server
> equipment we're running in the machine room - not just physical security,
> but data security.
> 
> It's my understanding that currently none of the machines are protected by
> UPS. Mitch donated some small ones last year (based on what little
> information I've gathered), but not sure where they went...APC ones, from
> my limited reading and small amount of experience with the topic, appear to
> be quite good and there's some reasonably priced models going around (from
> Harris Technology no less, I'm sure they are even cheaper elsewhere also)
> 
> The cost would of course, be based on how many we wanted to load it up
> with.

There are a couple of arguments against UPS protection. Grahame has 
already mentioned on IRC our lack of significant problems with power 
(averaging 1-2 outages/year in the last six years) and the difficulty in 
maintaining them.

We also have to remember that the UCC machine room floor is built to 
unknown standards, and server-sized UPSes are pretty heavy IME.

> On another note, I've not got access to all the stuff on mission control,
> so this is just a guess, but it looks like we're monitoring the temperature
> of individual servers, but are we doing any general environmental
> monitoring and also access monitoring on the machine room?

We did have a random temperature probe checking the outflow of the aircon, 
but that's gone now. Replacements may not be a bad idea.
                                                                                                    
An idea sitting in my head for a while is to pull the status of the door 
sensors into an RRDtool graph or similar. Implementation is blocked on my 
plan for rearchitecting the door server sfotware, though.
                                                                                                    
David Adam
UCC Wheel Member                                                                                    
zanchey@