Dull Men's Club

true silence i experienced once in an anechoic chamber.

Scarriest silence i've ever heard: a full power-down of a server room i had spent many hours in.

In 1998 I worked for a local ISP and would occasionally work the late night shift by myself since we offered 24/7 phone support. It was a great job... go to work and spend hours surfing the internet at insanely fast speeds. One night a huge thunderstorm hit and the lights went out, my computer shut down and then about 3 seconds later it came back. The whole time I could still hear the server room humming along. I thought to myself "battery backups are amazing" and didn't give it another thought. Until about 20 minutes later when that server room hum went silent. I was dumbstruck. My computer was still on. The lights were still on. But the whole internet for our region came through that room and it was no longer on. I had no idea what to do... I sat there for anywhere between 5 seconds to 10 minutes trying to figure out what my first step should be and then the phone rang. I answered it expecting an upset customer wanting to know why her Netscape wasn't working, but instead it was my boss, the owner of the company. He never called in, and he sounded chipper and said that he just wanted to make sure everything was ok with the storm that had just come through. I stammered "Uh, so, you don't know what's going on?" He lived about 30 minutes away but he was in the office in 10 minutes and had about 150 feet of extension cords. We ran the extension cords over to the outlets that were powered by the building's generator and got them hooked up to the server room to get it back online.

I've never experienced a worse silence in my life since.

You just triggered my PTSD. We had a leg of our three phase burn out in juuuust the right way where our UPS wouldn't accept the dirty power but it didn't trigger the backup generator. The electrician didn't arrive in time to manually engage the transfer switch, and the batteries ran down on the ups before we could get everything safely shut down. I don't think I've encountered a quiet quite like that since

Boring disasters are the best disasters.

I’ve migrated two Datacenters and the sound when the last server goes offline is something else. You know it’s supposed to be quiet, but your mind still races for a bit, thinking there’s something wrong.

"You hear that? That's the sound of broken SLAs."

Yikes! Was the entire rack plugged into a single UPS?

Haha! High availability my ass! Made me chuckle 🤭

Unexpected shutdowns of an entire HA cluster can be fun.

But it “shouldn’t” cause any problems, so mark it down as a test.

Yeah, that bowel-loosening sensation as your mind races through all the things that could be broken now