When a wind storm wants to play in a coffee shop
I am not official IT, I just know enough about our companies computers to keep them running and install new parts when one breaks.
This is a story of one breaking.
Tropical storm Ian is hitting our small Canadian province directly but the hype was mostly nothing for our part of the province. However we happened to have these small little power flickers that nobody would overly care about right? And obviously in a privately owned coffee gas station would have decent battery backups right?
Wrong, I have been maintaining these machines that for the most part work and I was granted funds to buy a new battery backup for one that died. I did not know what happened to this retired machine until today. 107
Turns out the coffee shops main server pc tower had a battery backup that died and needed a replacement, so logically they would grab another battery backup. And what did I find, the dead battery backup that had been replaced powering the server (horribly).
So whenever a power flicker happened the machine would instantly die, that means any coffee order in drive thru and walk in now has to wait 5 minutes for the machine to boot. Multiply that by the 30 minutes I spent scrambling for a solution and you got a hot mess in a coffee shop.
At the 30 minute mark I clued in why did the server die but not the drive thru and I started digging into the forest of wires and see a battery backup happily chugging along. I grab a power bar from our storage and replace the backup power with a power strip and hook the server up to a battery backup and all is good in the world.
TL;DR: cheap company has 2 battery backups die, replaces one broken machine with another, chaos ensues when a storm plays with the power lines
Side note: took apart the machines and found the batteries to be very spicy pillows 107