I love power outages. Especially at work- it also kills the phone system. Lock the door, ignore them.

I was merely asking, in a round about way, how many of the new generator users know how thier gizmo works.

We do all we can here, despite the sillinees above us.

Then again, we are a tech college. If it gets bad enough, from a computer point of view, we deputize the computer enginnering and e-commerce students. :P

Sad thing is, we also have civil engineering and construction practices & management programs here, and when the roof blew off the dining hall in a sotrm, they were threatened with dismissal if they tried to get on the roof to fix it. All these guys have thier own tools, and it is a flat roof, no major safety issues. Just some pinhead who is full of thier own authority flexing thier muscles so they can feel good, rather than worrying about what needs to be done. *shakes head* Threatened to be thrown out of school becuase they wanted to lessen a leak in thier dining room's roof.

Sounds like a prime candidate for a "DARWIN"

Fair enough. At my work, the backup generator goes on. If it doesn't, then I call the Facilities people. The backup generator here is diesel and the size of a large SUV. I don't touch it. If it doesn't kick on, I go home. Woo-hoo!

Regards, Vince

RE Backup plans that work...

Most places, I'd say no, but I know a couple of the banks down in the Wall St area did OK post 9/11 (like were switched to a backup site BEFORE the 1st tower came down)

I've seen some real good disaster plans. Ran into a guy I went to college with on 9/12/01, on his way to his office - he's his companies CIO (smallish company, but still multi city). He says that when the 1st plane hit the WTC, he turned around, grabbed the disaster plan book off the shelf, opened to "Terrorism, NYC" and implimented the plan he had worked out a couple of years before, and revised regularly

Of course, his backgound as both a Computer Science major, AND as a police officer and then MIS specalist of a Major Police department didn't hurt him

So, when was the last time YOUR company pulled a full up disaster drill?

Benjamin,
First - thanks for what you are doing over there.

One question for you - you say backups to CD in open format - GOOD idea, the question is, how are you doing this? It's something I've wanted to impliment at home for a while

Charlie

I arrived to work one day early in this year to find there was nothing but emergency lights. Had to go home and work from home on th vpn for the day, we don't have generators but do have alternate sites so we can all operate from vpn for any length of time.

Around here, everyone uses XP, so we do our backups with XP's integrated burning software.

Your friend is a man after my own heart. Sitting under my desk is a file box. It is affectionately known by a name I can't say here, but it is labled OSP. Inside is a number of manila envelopes. Each is labeled for a set of parameters. I know what is in there, but I will tear the right one open if the time comes, just becuase I know I "know" what is in there. Maps, check lists, that kind of thing. It gets updated every six months, or if I move. There is a red folder with maps of the various ways for me to get my folks. Yellow folder is for site B.

And every so often, I "sand table" the plans. I work out subplans for varous things like weather, people bailing out of suburbia, that kind of thing.

For now I am using the manual method. I go through all the datafile subdirectories and anything with a new date/time stamp I drag and drop into the cd burner application.

I am going to get an automated application that will look at the end of the day at all the datafiles automatically, select the ones that have a new date/time stamp, and send them to the cd without needing my scrutiny. Should save me some time.