university shutdown for 28 hours bullshit

[cnst]

I'm amazed how much fuss the university has generated with the supposed connection of some new building to their power grid. The MC/DC buildings are officially shut down for 28 hours (they even put metal chains on the doors between DC and the small building accessible through E3/EIT), there is a diesel power generator next to MC that is working

Comments

[qviri]

Because, UW.

[icedrake]

I cannot comment on the overall situation, but I can tell you the university *used* to have a generator, in the GSC complex. I was the one stuck working the gravey shift at Turnkey just after the big blackout of 2003 hit. We had emergency lighting until about 2:30am, and then it slowly died.

Truth is, the university consumed ludicrous amounts of power -- you'd need a massive investment in generators, fuel, and equipment maintenance if you were trying to ensure uninterrupted operations. And frankly, CS would still not get top priority. Servers and routers can be rebooted. Biology experiments? Not so much.

[chemical_lover]

Or things like the fume hoods in the Chemistry buildings. You could kill people if they were able to get in and the fume hoods were down.

[frost_dragon]

I can only guess, however I can see good reasons for all of this

[dawn_guy]

For IST, a generator was procured to allow core services to continue to function with reduced service; a combination of unpaid volunteer staff and people compensated for being on call were working through the weekend to keep core computing and network services available. For CS, computer support staff volunteered to come in over the weekend to reduce the amount of downtime; you're lucky those people still care enough to put in that extra effort. In other areas, services were being shut down as early as Friday noon and may still be unavailable

[cnst]

Certainly, I do appreciate that the CS was up and running at least by 22:00 when I came back to DC, my complaint is about the outage in general.

Regarding the "we are down" notice instead of the regular web-sites: I am one of those folks that would argue that a server being unavailable is a much better option than a backup server that simply returns an error notice. (Think bots.)

It's nice to know that the MC does actually have a regular diesel generator in place; how long has it been broken, and why has it not been fixed yet?

Yes, and I did have the outage marked in my calendar - I do appreciate that the CSCF staff has bothered to send a very advanced notice along the way, but that doesn't mean that I appreciate such a long outage in and of itself.

backup generator

[anonymous]

For the record: the backup generator that used to be installed in the MC is long gone. It was installed in the 1960's when the building was built. It was flywheel-based. Some time in the 1970's the flywheel was stopped and over time the equipment atrophied. The last of the equipment (including the flywheel) was finally removed a few years ago. As far as I know, no IT group on campus has a permanent backup generator facility -- if an outage lasts longer than a given UPS' capacity, "too bad".

I should also mention that within CSCF we spec's and sourced a generator that would have been sufficient to run a minimal network infrastructure (50A @ 208v), but decided against it when it was announced that physical access would not be possible.