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Shortest period to switch off electronic equipent for before switching on

The office building where I worked had huge diesel-powered generator to cope with power cuts. My office was near it, and I know it wasn't tested during office hours for five years. One day there was a power cut that affected the whole town, and the diesel engine fired up, amid a tremendous roar and lots of filthy black smoke. Power returned for about a minute and then there was a huge explosion and a jet of flames. Apparently the generator couldn't handle the load, even with the engine working as hard as it could (a good diesel grunt!) and something caught fire, igniting the diesel tank. Turned out that it had been specced back in the days when there wasn't a PC on every single person's desk, and it was woefully underpowered for the modern demands that were placed on it.

Reply to
NY
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to cope

Conversely the possibly apocryphal story I heard had the generator tested regularly. When eventually needed it ran for a few minutes and then ran out of fuel. The protocol didn't include top-ups!

Mike.

Reply to
MJC

The one I know of is where the fuel pump was on the non-maintained mains. All the tests were fine. But when the power went off for real so did the fuel pump...

BTW I use 30 seconds too. 30 odd years of computers here, quite often dealing directly with the HW designers so I could write the tests.

Andy

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Reply to
Vir Campestris

AIUI: A short press is one way of a normal shutdown - sometimes you have to press it a little longer...................

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Reply to
Benderthe.evilrobot

There's not exactly a shortage of those - but it does tend to be more older designs.

It does sometimes happen - pretending it doesn't won't save you.

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Reply to
Benderthe.evilrobot

IC designers tend to do a better job protecting against weird power cycles and a lot more system designers have been burned and learned.

Of course. There are morons designing stuff all the time. Worse, there are companies that don't care that they're making crap.

Reply to
krw

Well - not really. What can you do with an app that is running and doesnt keep files in a "safe" state?

Even some working apps dont leave files in a consistent state while idle (although agreed that is bad design).

Less said about malware busy scribbling all over your drive to maximise the chance of coming back to life after a reboot the better...

The point is that an operating system cannot make assumptions about what programs are trying to do and having "well formed" behaviour - they need to try to be robust no matter what is mucking around, while a disk is full and a drive is trying to remap to sort out bad sectors.

But the only true test of a restore is to actually wipe and restore on the same hardware build - when it is too late to find out it didnt get recorded correctly if you only have 1 machine (or 2 with different builds)......

And keep the old one as a fallback....

Stephen Hope stephen snipped-for-privacy@xyzworld.com Replace xyz with ntl to reply

Reply to
Stephen

We had one where someone spoofed the guage and drained the tank.

Stephen Hope stephen snipped-for-privacy@xyzworld.com Replace xyz with ntl to reply

Reply to
Stephen

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