Sydney had some very heavy storms today, on the back of what is an unseasonal string of storms.  The drains outside my new home office were at capacity for the first time and with the rain coming down…

It flooded

However by and large things went well.  First thing was to cut mains power to the room as a puddle was forming under my rack.  A laptop was on hand and the LAN infrastructure was on power protection, so all the machines that matter shut down cleanly. 

What did I learn?

• My SQL Server (Proliant ML530, 2x Xeons, 3Gb, Ultra3 RAID) takes the longest to shut down so should be shut down first.  Tacitly I knew this, but didn’t connect the dots at the time (with the UPS ticking away)
• Power packs, in fact mains power in general should be off the floor.  I am gonna make a policy about this.  Again it could have been a lot worse but it was a distraction with the clock ticking.  Command hooks are cheap and I will be making some CapEx 3M’s way shortly.
• The floor is a bad place to stack paperwork.  Nothing important was lost but Rob and Coronel has a date with the hair dryer
• One of my UPSes goes Red with plenty of juice to spare.  Might need to do more testing.