"More power, Igor! I need more power!"

[unixronin]

UPSen don't generally have hostnames, or I could name the new UPS Igor.

In Merrimack, we had our server rack and my workstation and gamebox powered off a 3KVA UPS (an APC SU3000RM5U) in the bottom of the rack, with all the other Windows PCs running off an APC SU1400 in the opposite corner of the downstairs den.  When we moved up here to Gilford, I saw the movers wheeling out the rack (from which I'd already removed all the servers) and went to stop them a moment while I took out the SU3000RM.  "No," they said, "it'll be fine where it is."  Things were hectic and confused, and somehow it got let go at that.

Then later on they mentioned that they were afraid to put our 1920s prohibition cabinet into the truck, because their "big" truck was down for maintenance with a transmission leak, the one they'd brought didn't have air-ride suspension, and they were worried about shock loads breaking the legs of the prohibition cabinet.

It turned out the 3KVA UPS was the sole item that didn't survive the move.  Something inside apparently fractured in a non-visible manner (and when I say "non-visible", I mean that first I stripped it down, then later on, this summer, my father and I stripped it down again together, and neither of us could find anything physically wrong.  The UPS would power up, but complained about an unbalanced load, no matter what load was connected (or none at all).  However, we didn't find this out for several months, because it was that long before I got around to wiring in a dedicated 30A circuit to the deckhouse where the server rack now lives, with a 5L30 outlet to plug it into.

So for the past year, the 1.4KVA UPS has been running the server rack and everything else was just plugged into surge suppressors.  Which have protected the equipment just fine, but which don't help much when a heavy thunderstorm comes through the area and we (almost invariably) lose power for a couple of seconds roughly as the leading edge of the storm reaches us.

"More power, Igor!  I need more power!"

This week, we finally got a new main UPS, from a computer equipment liquidator in Minnesota.  It's an APC SU3000RM2U rebadged as a HP R3000XR.  (Kinda spiffy, actually.  It's a DSP-controlled transformerless design that APC claims is 90% efficient.)  Last night, I cut everything in the server rack (yama, nijo, minbar, minbar's disk arrays, the cable "modem", the core switch, and the not-yet-set-up new NAS box) over onto the new UPS, ran a power line through the cable port to my desk to put babylon5 and vorlon onto it, then moved the 1.4KVA UPS from the deckhouse into the far corner of our "great room" (for lack of any better name) and put pond, zocalo and oi dong onto it.  We finally have almost all the machines back on uninterruptible power again.

Now I just need a small UPS for mabolgamp, which is in the opposite corner of the room not really near anything else, and another for corydon upstairs.  And sometime I need to find myself a replacement LTO drive for backups... and I'm waiting for 3Ware to release Solaris 10 drivers for their 9500 series SATA RAID controllers so that I can bring up the new 3.6TB NAS box... then prototype a Gentoo install on the spare 1U box so I can get the bugs out before I reinstall babylon5... then I need to reinstall babylon5 itself ...

sigh — A geek's work is never done.  :)

Comments

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

My boxen:
curie - old home server, Gentoo, Athlon XP, 1GiB RAM, 3ware 7006-2, RAID1 200G.
grubbs - new home server, Gentoo, Core2 Q6600, 5.5GiB RAM (due to BIOS glitch, no more than that usable, 6G installed), 3ware 9500S-8, RAID5 1.74TiB.
bohr - new very new workstation, Core2 Q9550, 16GiB RAM. 1.36TiB MD RAID10. ATI Radeon HD3650.
ebadi - my laptop, Gentoo, T2300, 1.5GiB RAM, 100G HDD.
gordimer - Marissa's laptop, WinXP

The old workstation setup was:
newton - running as X display head, Gentoo, AthlonXP, 1GiB RAM, Geforce gfx.
buck - actually ran all X apps here, Gentoo. quad (dual-dual) G5, 12GiB RAM.

The old server box needs to go away soon, plus might be a laptop hand-me-down party.

Plus a smattering of embedded hardware, named by it's model only.
MyCable XXS1500, TinCan Nail, Genesi Efika, OLPC (rev B prototype and final)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I need to see if I can find a newer laptop for cymrullewes sometime, because trying to maintain software support for the 600E's uncooperative hardware drives me nuts. The biggest problem is the sound chip, a Crystal Logic CS4236B (ISA) which Linux consistently misidentifies and misreports as a CS4611 (PCI), causing all kinds of fun. I read somewhere that roughly one in four people who try to install Linux on a Thinkpad 600 ever gets the sound working. I managed it three times, but on the most recent reinstall, the odds caught up to me and I can't get any sound driver I've tried — ALSA, kernel OSS/free, commercial OSS — to so much as acknowledge that the sound hardware even exists, let alone actually initialize it.