What was that about?

[ebikeerwidnes]

Some of you guys were much nearer to the nuts and bolts of resilience than me. I was just doing things like dress rehearsals for disasters.

My favourite experience of that was when we got the sparks to simulate a power failure. The UPS kicked in (good) the diesel generators fired up (good) smoky exhaust from the diesels went in through a window and set off the fire alarms (er ... sub-optimal)

We had something similar

test for power failure
mains power switched off
generators start automatically and batteries cut in to maintain power until they are upt o speed

generators start - cough, splutter and fail

panic as they try to get the mains back on before the batteries run out


then major investigation as to why the generators failed

turns out the diesel supplier was changed as part of an efficiency drive and supplied substandard diesel

 

[matticus]

Both of those fall into the category of Successful Test!

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

Both of those fall into the category of Successful Test!

True
better to find the problems in a controlled test than an unexpected event!


reminds me
on Y2K night they swiched to generators a few hours before midnight and kept running them for 48 hours
just in case

AND they had a back up generator in the car park and wired up ready - just in case the 2 generators inside failed

 

[Dogtrousers]

True
better to find the problems in a controlled test than an unexpected event!


reminds me
on Y2K night they swiched to generators a few hours before midnight and kept running them for 48 hours
just in case

AND they had a back up generator in the car park and wired up ready - just in case the 2 generators inside failed

Did you wear two pairs of underpants?

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

Did you wear two pairs of underpants?

No - I nominated someone else on our team to cover Y2K

The decision was simple - he got paid massive amounts of overtime as he was 1/2 a rank below me and several ranks below our "boss"
so we would have only got 2 hours at normal time

so I was at my partner's mother's house with my partner and our daughter
and a mobile phone and a laptop and a modem

I had our IT support dial in modems set up so anyone could dial in from anywhere (with security) if something went wrong
we didn;t need it

Interestingly -- when they kicked me out made me redundant 10 months later I noticed that on my last day all my access, diaal ins and userids had already been cancelled

when I got home I tried the emergency Y2K dial-in system and I could still get in
I only went as far as getting a login in prompt from the main systems

but I knew several passwords for userids that no-one else knew about so if I had been a different type of person..........

 

[Dogtrousers]

I left one job in the 80s and a few weeks later got a very worried call from someone wanting an admin password. I cruelly gave them a spurious password then rang back a few minutes later with the real one. They didn't appreciate the joke.

They were only demo systems but would have taken a bit of time to rebuild.

 

[Drago]

I was very gutted when the millennium bug didn't appear and civilisation didn't collapse.

I had months of food, water, radios, first aid stuff, fuel, weapons, and those ungrateful ******* at Microsoft didnt crash society. I would be a king today if it werent for Bill Gates.

 

[Dogtrousers]

I was very gutted when the millennium bug didn't appear and civilisation didn't collapse.

I had months of food, water, radios, first aid stuff, fuel, weapons, and those ungrateful ******* at Microsoft didnt crash society. I would be a king today if it werent for Bill Gates.

You've got the likes of me and @ebikeerwidnes to thank for that. A lot of people put in a lot of work (and made a lot of money in some cases) clearing up the crap so that things worked.