Liebert UPS's

[RichP]

Got a letter from our Liebert rep and I'm curious, never heard this before, I have a Liebert Series 300 and according to them there are capacitors in there that have a life 'between 5 and 7 years'. I already know the batteries have a life of around that 5-7 years, never had any problems with caps and I've had more than a few of these in various jobs that I have had to take care of. This is a new one on me. Curious if it's a sales gimmic like the repair shop showing you a normally worn serpentine belt with the little cracks in it and telling you you need a new belt or if it's legitimate.

Kinda like the old star trek series 'the reactor is critical' well yea pecker head, it wouldn't work if it's wasn't

 

[ChiXJeff]

That's a new one. A quick google here doesn't show anything along those lines. Probably worth pinging Liebert directly.

 

[RichP]

Yea, I read the 10 page white paper Emerson Network Power sent, sounds reasonable but they do spend the first two paragraphs saying 'maybe' in case backpedaling is needed. Otherwise it sounds legit and they are some pretty hefty caps on both the AC and DC sides. Problem is we are building a new building and doubling the size of our humidor, shipping, office space and my data center, the one we have wont be big enough to supply the whole building so we're going with a much larger one, probably 2 or 3. Question is do we bother getting this service done if we're not taking it with us.

 

[ChiXJeff]

If you're leaving it behind, heck, no!

Still irritates me that I had to abandon an Exide plus50 50kVA UPS at USR/3Com when we moved out of Morton Grove.

 

[RichP]

If you're leaving it behind, heck, no!

Still irritates me that I had to abandon an Exide plus50 50kVA UPS at USR/3Com when we moved out of Morton Grove.

We will still own the building and hopefully will be renting it out, the ups is 9 years old and right now supplies two outlets to each office and the call center divider room for 12 people, the liebert air box/humidifier is 3, that stays too.

One other question, I'm doing a patch package from HP to my HP-UX boxes, ran the software, dumped the xml file on the hp website and they put the bundle together of needed and recommended, I downloaded and built the depot. When I add the patches can I just pick them all at once and let sam do it ? or do they need to go in a certain order ? I did the let sam do them all on ren my netbackup server with no issues, stimpy on the other hand is the main web server and I sure do not want to screw that one up, no desire to test my ignite tape. Got to do it this weekend so we can upgrade to the new informix 11.5 sat is going to be a long nite.

 

[ChiXJeff]

After a patch analysis at the ITRC, we customarily just pull down the combined depot, and make a 1 shot run at swinstall. All of the dependencies should be covered in the depot.

BTW, if you're on anything newer than 11.00, make both servers Ignite repositories for each other (outside of vg00, you'll get this,) as well as making bootable tapes for each. When one of them burns down, Igniting over the network is significantly faster than reloading from tape. I can recover the rx8640 servers (11iV2) in under an hour this way. I'm building a couple of new dedicated Ignite servers here, I should be able to get most of the 35 servers up and running at a D/R exercise in under 12 hours with a little luck.

 

[WB9YZU]

Electrolytic Caps do go bad. They are oil filled cans with a metal/paper/metal winding spiral wind. When they do go bad, they generally go open and don't work at all. Sometimes they leak and do all of the above.

Depending on how the device was engineered (how close of tollerance the caps were matched to the specification) , and the reliability of the capacitor supplier, it is possible that they are seeing field failures. For example: Many early Sony camcorders had an early death because the surface mount caps would leak all over the board and corrode the circuit board. MTBF on these cameras was 4-5 years.