Reliability v. Fire Risk

[Dwight Ernest]

Yesterday when I came in to the office, one of the first things I
noticed was a very noxious odour or burnt components or crisped
circuit boards. Those who had arrived before me filled me in:
at about 8:30 a.m., all of the smoke alarms on our office floor
had been activated. The London Fire Brigade responded with a full
batallion, and one of my colleagues met them rushing to our floor
as he was arriving for work.

One of the Sun 3/50 workstations we work with had "caught fire,"
he said. The firefighters apparently only had to cut the power to
prevent it spreading. A bit worrisome. The offending system unit
had already been removed to a storage location to prevent the
spread of the noxious odour.

When the Sun CE arrived to look at it, I got my first look at it as well.
One of the largest components on the PCB had been completed burnt up,
although the exterior of the box showed absolutely no damage from fire nor
from smoke. The PCB itself had at one location been burnt through. The
component involved was a "DC-DC Convertor".

The Sun CE swore that he'd never seen this before in three years of
experience with Suns. He even wrote this down on the Call Sheet.

We leave our Suns up and running on a 24-hour 365-day duty cycle.  They
all act as servers for something or other, even if just for shared
printers (we run a lot of PC-NFS in both normal office environments and
journalistic environments).

After this scary experience I'm wondering whether we ought to change that
policy.

		--Dwight Ernest
		  Technical Systems Coordinator
		  The Independent (Newspaper Publishing PLC)
		  40 City Road, London EC1Y 2DB United Kingdom
		     Phone: +44 1 956 1633
		     Fax:   +44 1 956 1996
		       UUCP: ...ukc!independent!dwight