3 Jul
2007
3 Jul
'07
2:27 p.m.
Seems reasonable. I remember one day the 1900 at QMC
went down and we
users were getting annoyed at the delay and we asked what was up, and
were told the air conditioning system had failed and under the raised
floor they had found nearly a foot of water. This was on the fifth
floor! Thinking about it now it's not feasible. The false floor had
ramps up from the normal floor at the computer room entrance, so the
water would have flowed out under the ramp and down the stair well and
lift shaft. Still, the story kept us quiet for a while.
Our false floor is actually at normal floor level, so the subfloor is of
course about a foot lower, and I have actually seen it flood. One time
the aircon went wrong; it's a type that dries the air and then
re-humidifies it by passing it over a tray of warm water. The valve
controlling the level failed and so did the drain. Nice. Fortunately
we noticed before it rose high enough to hit the electrics.
We had a different incident on Saturday after we had shut down all the
power in the main machine room for safety testing. About lunchtime,
when the engineers had restored some of the power, we realised there was
a smell of burning -- not really what you want in your central machine
room. After a few panicky minutes, we realised it was the aircon.
Normally it works hard to cool the room, but it's designed to maintain a
certain temperature. With all the servers switched off, it was trying
for the first time in years to heat the place up, and of course the
heating coils were full of dust.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York