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USPTO Power Outage Damages Equipment and Shuts Down IT Systems (uspto.gov)
An anonymous reader sends word that many online systems at the United States Patent and Trademark Office are down due to damaged equipment after a power outage. A statement from the USPTO reads in part: "A major power outage at USPTO headquarters occurred last night resulting in damaged equipment that required the subsequent shutdown of many of our online and IT systems. This includes our filing, searching, and payment systems, as well as the systems our examiners across the country use. We are working diligently to assess the operational impact on all our systems and to determine how soon they can be safely brought back into service in the coming days. We understand how critical these systems are for our customers, and our teams will continue to work around the clock to restore them as quickly as possible, though the impacts may be felt through the Christmas holiday. We know many people have questions regarding filing and payment deadlines. We are reviewing this topic and will provide an update when we have further information."
Guess they'll need to use literal rubber stamps now!
They thought about failover, but weren't sure it wouldn't infringe on a patent so they skipped it.
United Parcel Service. That's a trademarked name, so we can't use it.
Have gnu, will travel.
For one thing, you have to replace the UPS battery every year.
3 - 5 years. I some network closet UPS's with 7 year old batteries that are still showing around 60% of original reserve capacity so we haven't bothered replacing them since they'll still last longer than our main server room batteries do in a power outage.
UPS battery changes are cheaper than replacing hardware that failed because it's not on a UPS.
If you have glitches often enough for it to be a problem, then it's money well spent.
That being said, I get the idea that people are forgetting that surge suppressors are a thing, and cheaper than UPS units. Hell, I have a whole-house one that I installed on my main breaker box.
I don't read AC A human right
Even older APC SmartUPS can give a false reading if they've never been fully cycled. Yes, they do a periodic self-test (you can hear the relay clicking when being performed), but not a full discharge and recharge cycle. With batteries that old, you'll be lucky if you get 2 to 5 minutes of runtime out of them at nominal load. In fact, for SmartUPS, they must be recalibrated with a new battery. Typically this used to involve putting a 25% or 33% load until the battery completely drains in order to learn the new runtime metric. We used to use a few halogen lights to provide the test load :)
Life is not for the lazy.