Why? The systems did not drain the battery and even if they did, I had jumper cables. Remember? It was in the story and is apparently a point of contention.

It's got nothing to do with what the wire can handle. A constant draw generates heat which builds in the cables. They get heat soak and as temps go up, so does resistance which generates more heat. That heat soak becomes a problem since copper's melting point is much higher than the rubber insulation surrounding it. If the rubber insulation melts, it can not only catch fire but it exposes the live cables with high current running through them to shorting out. A 90 amp short makes for an impressive and very dangerous show.

Yeah, I was a diesel mechanic too. Whoop-tee-do. You're a bit off on the average draw of a 12v system there, too. If the starter was pulling that much power, most fuses and fusible links for the starting systems would blow at those current draws. Ratings on starter motors are for peak draw, not average draw. The only times you will hit peak draw is when you have a problem with your engine that is keeping it from turning over easily.

Jumper cables are not for "sharing juice". They "link" two batteries so that the charging system from the running car can charge the battery of the non-running car enough to start the non-running car. That draw is no where near any peak draw of a starting system. If you are using your jumper cables to actually start the other car you are running several risks. Those include compromising your jumper cables, blowing up one or more batteries and damaging the charging system and other electrical systems of the car providing the jump. If you have been doing it that way then you've been doing it wrong.

Again, I will restate, condescending or not, jumper cables are not meant for constant draws of 90 amps like what I was dealing with. Heat soak becomes a problem and the insulation can become compromised.

*SIGH*

Jumper cables are designed for short bursts of high draw. "High draw" being around 30-40 amps. Most starter motors in cars draw between 30 and 60 amps max, some diesels will draw up to 120 amps.

However, they are not designed for a constant draw of 30-60 amps. The cables will get hot from just trying to jumpstart a car. Having a rack with a server, a disk array, a network switch and a backup appliance draws a considerable amount of power. Even if each of them were all running at the typical 15 amp draw like you see from a 120V circuit, that's still 60 amps of draw (reality was more like 90 amps and 15A on 120VAC doesn't really equate to 15A on 12VDC). Twice as much as what a standard starter motor draws on jumper cables. Add to that the fact that it's a constant draw over a half hour or so and the thermal properties of jumper cable insulation becomes a factor. If you had more than a passing knowledge of automotive charging and starting systems, you'd know that.

The fan was already there and running to move air across the ailing UPS. Obviously in place to handle the heat problem caused by the failed fan. Whether the cables and battery getting hot would have been an issue or not wasn't a concern because the fan was moving air and dissipating heat. Even just the calming effect that a perceived reduction in risk due to the operation of the fan on the cables and battery does wonders for performance of the tech trying to fix the problem quickly.

A box fan, whether it's effective or not, is a small cost of insurance to eliminate a condition that is easily avoidable. Even if you are flying by the seat of your pants and operating on a UPS system with unregulated power coursing through the output rails. Why that is a point of contention, I'm not sure, but in true Slashdot commenter fashion, you've managed to nitpick an insignificant part of a story with incomplete information just to discredit and insult a poster over something of no consequence to you. Good job!

Slashdot takes the "fun" out of dysfunctional.

Looks like somebody doesn't want email access today, huh? (End BOFH mode)

I once repaired a critical UPS that was attached to a critical database server actively recording data in the middle of a test shot with jumper cables and the battery from my truck. All that just to replace a fan that kept sending the UPS in to panic mode for an overheating battery and trying to start a shutdown sequence on the database server.It was a 12v power source for the UPS (old, old equipment) coming out of the AC to DC power supply. The UPS was part of a suite of equipment that included the database server, the array, a backup device, a network switch and the UPS hardwired to each of them in it's own rack. Don't ask me who made it. All I know is it was an Informix based DB and the maker was some esoteric, specific solution company I never heard of and before my time anyway. All I knew was the replacement parts had a 2 week lead time and I have no idea why this company chose to hold up such critical data with such arcane and unsupportable equipment. But, I had to shutdown the UPS to do the work but the battery didn't have enough juice to support the 30 minutes it was going to take to do the work. The battery power would have been killed once the unit was off anyway.

So I attached my jumper cables and the 600 amp battery from my truck to the output rails on the UPS, after the control switches. From there it was just juice to the rails and then to the server and it's data array. The car battery had about 45-55 minutes of juice for the suite to run on full-tilt. So I shut the UPS down and the servers, thankfully, stayed up! Had a box fan blowing on the battery and jumper cables. I disassembled the UPS case, cut the bad fan out and spliced the old connector on to the new fan I got at a local surplus store for $3. Plugged it all in, reassembled and turned the UPS on. It went through diagnostics and everything went green. Then the overload light started blinking and the warning chime came on. I pulled the jumper cables off and the overload warning went away and things stayed stable. The fan stayed on and nothing went down.

I probably should have gotten an award for it because it was a test shot for a multi-billion dollar contract but I was more afraid of disciplinary action over the risk than getting any praise for it. As far as I know, to this day, only two other people at that company know what happened

No, I don't make it seem that way. You have a different solution in place and take exception to my comments and are projecting your thoughts on me. I said it makes it easier to not have to deal with it. I am happy with my level of protection on my network with the method I employ. What makes it easier is not only that I don't have to deal with any errors or connectivity problems between network resources over conflicting firewalls but I also do not have to deal with updating and maintaining every single soft device I have.

See, I do network and system security for a living. I deal with threat mitigation all day, every day. Sometimes all night and on weekends as well. I really don't want to do it on my home network as well. So my solution works for me and affords me the ease of use that something as simple as a refrigerator or a coffee marker does. It does what I need it to do, it does it automatically, has a fair amount of safety built in, I don't have to think about it and if it has an issue, it tells me it needs my help.

If your complex solution affords you a piece of mind that you feel you cannot get any other way then good for you. My post is not a detraction of your configuration but rather a voicing of support for the OP's configuration because mine is similar. Don't make it more than it is.

...two companies that are becoming increasingly dependent on downloaded data as a profit vehicle deem a media format dead doesn't mean it is.

There are other uses for Blu-Ray. A major one comes to mind in backup solutions and data warehousing. I know a couple companies as well as military programs that keep extremely out-dated media formats in business (*cough* 9-track *cough*)just because they are still using technology in a production environment that is dependent upon that media.

Besides that, look at history for an idea on how accurate market and technology predictions from the likes of Microsoft and Apple have been. I mean, if Jobs honestly had a lockdown on what technology REALLY mattered instead of what the next toy people wanted was, I'd be posting from a iPhone right now instead of a Windows Mobile device. If Bill Gates was any kind of oracle, the laptop on my desk wouldn't need more than 64K of RAM and there would be no significant bugs in my OS that any significant number of users would want fixed.

...that you have uninterrupted flow of shared network resources on your network. Unless, of course, permissions are set up to prevent that.

I run a hard firewall and gateway at home as well as MAC address access so I can keep others off of my wired and wireless networks without having to compromise the ease of use a home network should allow. It's nice being able to have a media center with data files, and attached carousel drives so I can actually watch any movie or listen to any music from any spot in my house. To do that easily and with little hassle, I got rid of all of my soft firewalls. It also means that I have a remote or two laying around instead of stacks and stacks of DVD cases, CD cases or MP3 players and rats nests worth of dongles, audio/video input cables and such laying around and cluttering up the place. Less junk for the pets and kids to chew on, yank on or destroy as well.

Specifically how many of the sites are pr0n or gambling sites.