This morning, I was called over to the building we keep our Off-Site Backup NAS at. The new tentants had the local Cable Co. over to do an install, and they needed access to the secure room with all the networking kit in it.
I went over to let them in, and explained where the network drops terminated, where their cable run came from and went to, and answered a few other questions. They looked like they had things under control, so I left.
About twenty minutes later, I was called back over. The techs needed to unplug our UPS so they could put one of those dual-plug splitters in (has six outlets on the front and uses the two in the wall), however they ran in to a problem. At some point in the past, the screw had fallen out of the metal faceplate on that outlet.
When they went to unplug the UPS, they bumped the faceplate and it made contact with one of the legs on the UPS plugs, shorting it and causing lots of sparks.
I got there a few minutes after this happened, and the two were trying to figure out the best way to proceed. One of them had a pair of plyers in his hands, and was saying that he was going to just use those to grip the UPS plug and pull it out quickly. I asked if they’d thought of shutting off the power.
Silence.
So went over to the (of course, unlabeled) breaker panel and told them to yell when the UPS switched to battery power, then I started throwing breakers. After making it through all of them, they hadn’t made a sound. Knowing that the wiring in the building was kind of sketchy, and that there were a few other breaker panels, I told them I was going to go try another one. The one with the plyers then said, “Naw, I’ll just try this again.” and then proceeded to rip the plug out using the plyers. Sparks flew, and then the plug came out. He then used the plyers to knock the faceplate off (which was now scortched and had a chunk burnt out of it), and plugged the UPS back in. It showed “0″ for input voltage.
“I think I killed it.”
On a hunch, I walked over to the breaker panel and, sure enough, one of them was tripped. After resetting it, I heard the UPS go back online. Apparently, when I was throwing breakers, they weren’t paying attention.
So now I’m looking to relocate our Off-Site backups.
Comments (0)