At 04:41 p.m. 05/08/2002 +1200, Peter Mott wrote:

Are you saying that CityLink does not have UPS and autostart generator on-site to run the whole works for at least 8 hours?

I wondered when this would come up. CityLink has a different architecture and there is no "central office". Switching centers have ups and generators and smaller buildings just have UPS. But that doesn't guarantee anything. Y2k showed up a lot of "interesting effects" and I'm sure they haven't all been rectified. Having a geny in the building doesn't mean its tested and feeds everywhere you think it does. BTW - the building people mentioned this was their first outage in 7 years. In the case of this morning, we (and the other telcos in the room) run off the local power and took a short hit of around 15 minutes, despite a local outage measured in hours. We also elected to go to geny due to the switching issues the power boys were facing. We also supplied power to other tennants who had a need. If you have ever closed an 11kV switch on a fault in a metro ring main sub, you will understand why we made that decision. "did the earth move for you ?" is being polite. "Sudden suntans", stuck HT gloves, etc sometimes result. (aside: HT gloves come up to your elbow, when they are "stuck" it means they've melted to something, normally the switch handle or the wall on the other side of the room from where you were not so long ago.) Now whats really interesting is that after my earlier post, an ISP contacted me to see if the outage in Courtenay Place was the cause of two dropped pings in Thorndon. He mentioned that some of todays NZNOG discussion was already posted in a security list (?) being sent around, probably misquoted. My concern is that as a list we share fairly openly about incidents mixed with a degree of good humour and frequent light relief. If an unknowing party is quoting the list, then we need a closed list or reduce the chatter or even the info conveyed. Summary - this mornings outage wasn't a simple - NO POWER. It was complex, with enough other indicators to fool experienced (power) operators. They actually did a good job. rich richard.naylor(a)citylink.co.nz - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog