Yesterday, just as I climbed into the bath, the bathroom light went off. And as I thought “that’s odd – we only changed the bulb a couple of months ago”, I heard the ominous sound of the UPSen beeping.
Pete went down to the electrickery cupboard, and reset the circuit breaker. It tripped again. So investigations began.
It transpired that some cat* had pissed on the TFT monitor in the server room. This caused the monitor to die, with a nasty burning small. This in its turn upset the KVM (a gadget that allows several base units to run with just one keyboard and monitor between them). One of the UPS in there appears to have a completely shagged battery, and that, coupled with the dead monitor and shagged keyboard, meant we couldn’t shut the linux server down before the UPS gave out. The monster UPS in the study simply gave up the ghost and switched itself off.
It took an hour or more to sort all this out, and then we went to the tip with the offending monitor, because of all the things I don’t want in the house, a cat-wee-infested monitor is not one of them …
it was quite sad, in a way; that was a 15″ monitor, one of a pair we bought in 1998 for something like £650 *each*.
* my money is on Iggy, for various reasons. He rowled to go out about 5 minutes before this happened, and then rowled to come straight back in again, because it was cold. So I suspect he took himself upstairs and relieved himself. I’m very fond of that cat, but sometimes I forget why …
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