Major Power Outage at SSL

Side note: I see the AP data is showing pretty much non-existant, is this a residual problem or just a side effect of Jocelyn apparently taking some time off?

Hey Matt,

I was worried for a while there that someone pulled the plug on this project. Not that anyone would ever do that; right?

I am really happy to see SETI@HOME come back online. Thanks for doing a great job and for keeping us informed. Most technical folks do not communicate very well. But, you have great technical skills AND communication skills which is a very rare combination.

Kudos and kudos.

Regards, Boomer
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They do have UPSes and remote control power switches (or those are part of a UPS or two.. it allows them to SSH in and power cycle a machine). I remember reading a few years ago that all the UPSes were basically just power strips at one point as the battery capacity in them was basically zero.

Even with a large 3000VA UPS, having 4-6 servers on it, some of which have 30+ HDDs, you're talking 5 minutes on brand new batteries for a graceful shutdown, and you can't just tell them all to shut down all at once. Some have to go down before others.

I know that this was kind of a freak occurrence, but it does appear to show a weakness in the systems. Would it possibly make sense to direct some of our fund raising contributions towards an even more robust UPS setup? Most UPS's of this size allow you to daisy chain multiple batteries together to allow more time to shut things down before they run out of juice. This makes sense to me, what do you guys there in the thick of it think?

Run time at full load went from a few minutes to about 6 hours.

Updates were posted in the Technical News section & the front page.

I would suggest that Boincstats could be used for this, they have a project news update section. Alternatively messages could be posted on other Boinc projects, and the word spread that way.

We need to keep a sensible balance here. It is NOT the end of the world if Seti goes down without prior knowledge for a couple of days. To those few who feel that it is, there are other Boinc projects to support in the meantime. There will be a good reason for the downtime and it will be back ASAP.


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Damsel Rescuer, Kitty Patron, Raccoon Friend, Uli Fan,
Julie Supporter, ES99 Admirer, PETA Member, 1st Childhood

I saw via the Cricket Graphs page that SETI was back up after the normal scheduled outage on Tuesday afternoon. When I checked the progress on my task reporting a few minutes later, it had taken a sudden nose dive. I COULD NOT GET TO THE HOME PAGE. I had to check the Lunatics site to get any information on this outage. If this was a scheduled outage there must be a better way of notifying people, how about a broadcast notice that will appear on the NOTICE tab.
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I don't buy computers, I build them!!

I saw via the Cricket Graphs page that SETI was back up after the normal scheduled outage on Tuesday afternoon. When I checked the progress on my task reporting a few minutes later, it had taken a sudden nose dive. I COULD NOT GET TO THE HOME PAGE. I had to check the Lunatics site to get any information on this outage. If this was a scheduled outage there must be a better way of notifying people, how about a broadcast notice that will appear on the NOTICE tab.

David Anderson made a post in the Boinc boards, but not until a day before the outage. I too had no idea we were to be down for a couple days. Luckily I asked on the Boinc boards what was going on, just before they too went lights-out.

Some more notice here would have been cool I think.

(And, I still don't quite understand why the forum's servers have anything to do with the scientific servers....... I think it's kind of- erm - dinosaurish that the forums have to go down for scientific maintenance)
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-Dave #2


3.2.0-33

Updates were posted in the Technical News section & the front page.

Can you point us rookies to the updates you're referring to? I don't see any updates since the power went out (29th), and most of the time I tried to look, the website seemed to be down.

It would be nice if SETI/BOINC could simply mirror their homepage to another location. Those of us that missed that 90 min window could then satisfy our curiosity and know the problem isn't on our end. Perhaps another UC Berkeley server (on the other side of campus?), but in an ideal world something offsite would be nice.

I'm a little surprised that there weren't even any announcements on the news section of the UC Berkeley homepage (that I could find).