3 ms·
> Losing the system due to power shenanigans is a risk I accept. There is another (very rare) failure an ups protects against, and that's imbalance in the elec
by ffsm8 2y ago
> Losing the system due to power shenanigans is a risk I accept.
There is another (very rare) failure an ups protects against, and that's imbalance in the electricity.
You can get a spike (up or down, both can be destructive) if there is construction in your area and something happens with the electricity, or lightning hits a pylon close enough to your house.
First job I worked at had multiple servers die like that, roughly 10 yrs ago. it's the only time I've ever heard of such an issue however
To my understanding, an ups protects from such spikes as well, as it will die before letting your servers get damaged
- deltarholamda 2y agoThis depends very much on the type of UPS. Big, high dollar UPSes will convert the AC to DC and back to AC, which gives amazing pure sine wave power. The $99 850VA APC you get from Office Depot does not do this. It switches from AC to battery very quickly, but it doesn't really do power conditioning. If you can afford the good ones, they genuinely improve reliability of your hardware over the long term. Clean power is great.
- int0x29 2y agoIsn't this what a surge protector is for?
- bayindirh 2y agoYes. In most cases, assuming you live in a 220V country, a surge protector will absorb the upwards spike, and the voltage range (a universal PSU can go as low as 107V) will handle the brownout voltage dip.
- Kerb_ 2y agoPretty sure surge protectors are less effective against dips than they are spikes
- acstapleton 2y agoNothing is really going to protect you from a direct lightning strike. Lightning strikes are on the order of millions of volts and thousands of amps. It will arc between circuits that are close enough and it will raise the ground voltage by thousands of volts too. You basically need a lighting rod buried deep into the earth to prevent it hitting your house directly and then you’re still probably going to deal with fried electronics (but your house will survive). Surge protectors are for faulty power supplies and much milder transient events on the grid and maybe a lightning strike a mile or so away.
- Wowfunhappy 2y agoWould a UPS protect against that either, though?
- Kirby64 2y agoNo. Current will find a way. Lightning will destroy things you didn’t even think would be possible to destroy.
- Wowfunhappy 2y agoSo I'm still left with int0x29's original question: "Isn't this [an electricity spike that a UPS could protect against] what a surge protector is for?"
- Gud 2y agoElectronics is absolutely sensitive to this. Please use filters.
- bboygravity 2y agoFilters won't help against prolonged periods of higher/lower voltages though.
- Gud 2y agoVoltages should be normalised before they hit the servers psu.
- dist-epoch 2y agoBut computer equipment uses switched power supplies which doesn't care about voltage, as long as there is enough power.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- danw1979 2y agoI’ve had firsthand experience of a lightning strike hitting some gear that I maintained… My parent’s house got hit right on the TV antenna, which was connected via coax down the the booster/splitter unit in comms cupboard … then somehow it got onto the nearby network patch panel and fried every wired ethernet controller attached to the network, including those built into switch ports, APs, etc. In the network switch, the current destroyed the device’s power supply too, as it was trying to get to ground I guess. Still a bit of a mystery how it got from the coax to the cat5. maybe a close parallel run the electricians put in somewhere ? Total network refit required, but thankfully there were no wired computers on site… I can imagine storage devices wouldn’t have fared very well.
- nuancebydefault 2y agoWell this is an other order of magnitude than 'spikes on the net'. The electrical field is so intense that current will easily cross large air gaps.
- manmal 2y agoWe’ve had such spikes in an old apartment we were living in. I had no servers back then, but LED lamps annoyingly failed every few weeks. It was an old building from the 60s and our own apartment had some iffy quick fixes in the installation.
- JonChesterfield 2y agoLightning took out a modem and some nearby hardware here about a week ago. Residential. The distribution of dead vs damaged vs nominally unharmed hardware points very directly at the copper wire carrying vdsl. Modem was connected via ethernet to everything else. I think the proper fix for that is probably to convert to optical, run along a fibre for a bit, then convert back. It seems likely that electricity will take a different route in preference to the glass. That turns out to be disproportionately annoying to spec (not a networking guy, gave up after an hour trying to distinguish products) so I've put a wifi bridge between the vdsl modem and everything else. Hopefully that's the failure mode contained for the next storm. Mainly posting because I have a ZFS array that was wired to the same modem as everything else. It seems to have survived the experience but that seems like luck.
- louwrentius 2y agoTrue, this is also what I mean with power shenanigans. My server is off most off the time, disconnected. But even if it wasn’t, I just accept the risk.
- ragebol 2y agoAssuming you live in the Netherlands judging just by name: our power grid is pretty damn reliable with little shenanigans. I'd take that risk indeed.
- louwrentius 2y agoYes, I’m in NL, indeed our grid is very reliable.