The Control.com site was down for a bit yesterday due to a defective firewall. It's interesting that all of our outages in recent memory, apart from a few at the network level, were due to defects in the very devices intended to prevent outages, namely firewalls and UPSs. I'm sure there's a general lesson in there somewhere, relating to the inverse proportionality between reliability and complexity in systems.

Anyway, we're back up now, and on a different network (Verizon FIOS instead of ATT T1s) just because it was the quickest way to get back online.

Ken Crater
Control.com

 

Ken... Obvioisly I can't comment on your UPS problem because details are missing. However, I suggest you check Control.Com Archives for:

http://control.com/Thread/1026160131 Titled "UPS Protection Coordination"

Regards, Phi Corso

 

>Ken... Obviously I can't comment on
>your UPS problem because details are
>missing. However, I suggest you check
>Control.Com Archives for [...]

Thanks, Phil, but our situation was a bit different, and related to the internal design of the UPS involved. It seems that when the internal battery reached end of life, the response of the unit was to shut down rather than alarm. From a user's perspective, this is sub-optimal.

That was a number of years ago, and we've since switched vendors (we're using APC now, which seem to be performing well), so I really wasn't looking for help so much as doing some general carping.

Ken Crater
Control.com

 

> It seems that when the internal battery reached end of life, the response of the unit was to shut down rather than alarm. From a user's perspective, this is sub-optimal.

Hmmm. An "Interuptible Power Supply". That sounds like it might
qualify for DesignNews' regular "Designed by Monkeys" feature!

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Steve Myres
Automation Solutions
(480) 232-6862