Common Housecat
went down for about 20 minutes on Friday. Our Five Nines of uptime were dashed to the ground by the uncommon treachery of the common housecat. We really need to get into a Colocation facility.
It's amazing how industrious our servers are at removing themselves from the internet. We have redundant backups for everything, uninterruptible power to everything, tons of bandwidth and beefy boxes. Still, we keep getting nailed by silly things. Our RAID drives find a way to die at the precise second that we finish wiping the backup. Our old router knew to take itself offline as soon as it was sure the entire team was out of town. Everything from faulty house wiring to funky drive controllers have taken us offline at some point.
But Friday took the cake. We suddenly found ourselves unable to reach the outside world. Somehow the router had gone down. But how??? It's on an Uninterruptible Power Supply! And we hadn't had a power outage in months! Ah, but on top of that UPS is a big red power button.
Cat Spikes (artist's rendition)
And on that button sits the cat. Sure, it's not as warm as it was about 20 minutes ago, but it's still warmer than the rest of the house.
Somebody needs to design a UPS that is not flat and comfortable, does not warm up nicely on a cold day, and does not have a hair-trigger OFF switch right on top of it. Either that or they need to ship it with cat spikes.
by
Jason Kester
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