Consultant pilot fish is on the way to visit one client when he gets a call that the network has gone down at another client's office -- and fish is the one on the hot seat.
"The previous day I had upgraded their firewalls, and I was afraid the new firewalls had failed for some reason," says fish. "I turned around and drove back 30-plus miles to the client's office.
"As I got out of the car, I heard generators running and asked one of their people what was going on. It seems a power line going into the main campus building had broken and all outside power was out in the offices.
"I checked, and the whole building was up and operational on generator power -- except the computer room. The power had failed about an hour before and the large UPS system had run out of battery power.
"Turns out when the UPS connections were set up, they assumed that the computer room was on the building circuits. But it had its own circuits, not on the main panels.
"Needless to say, they had the electricians set up a separate external connection for the computer room, with its own generator, very shortly after that."
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