Last night the mains power failed to the building and kept tripping in and out. The UPS immediately took over and the generator kicked in as planned. Because of the up and down nature of the electrical supply we left the building running on generator until we were happy that the supply company had resolved the power problem which took a number of hours.

Unfortunately, over the last week or so we’ve had approx. 6 similar (albeit lesser) power feed issues and that’s apparently drained the UPS batteries. The engineer attended this morning and advised us that the expected life would be 8-10 years. However, we are now advised after diagnostic tests, that most of the 60-odd cells need replacing now (after only 2-3 years usage). This we’re arranging over the course of the next few days.

The effect of these problems last night was that connectivity with a few servers was lost and not restored until this morning but these we found to be internal issues with dirty file systems not allowing booting and other services on client servers failing to re-start correctly. As far as we can see, apart from the building UPS batteries reaching “end of life” far earlier than we expected, all our systems reacted correctly.