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I've heard of a case where a dog would bark just before the landline phone rang. Eventually they worked out that the phone line was shorting to the metal peg that the dog was chained to, so it was getting a 60V shock each time. Well it sort of is, but dog barking also means it is probably running around which would trip the flood lights. It's a chain of cause and effect but there is some real correlation.
I love how the cause the user sites is three tiers down from the actual cause: I wouldn't be suprised that the dog consistently barked everytime the flood went on, so of course the correlation existed. I kinda doubt the CFO thought the dog was the cause, and probably felt silly stating the facts, but heck, that's what he sees. Correlation is not causation but correlation most definitely means something - it's not useless information.
It's almost always a starting point and as a technician anyone worth a damn can start there and detect the problem. Correlation does not equal causation. The dog barking was not the direct cause if the crash, the animals activatint the motion sensor for the floodlight was. That's why powerline networking was invented.
Someone figured they were going to have to troubleshoot power issues anyway, might as well make them network related. Beyond that it's all your job anyway, so it only eliminates one point of failure. Power over Ethernet is a different thing from powerline networking sometimes called Ethernet over Power. A friend had to do powerline networking in a rental, their desktop PSU was causing so much interference they couldn't get internet access well, it was incredibly slow from packet loss when they turned it on.
Sounds like a cheap, shitty PSU to me. You know, I never quite understood why people love to skimp on the PSU when building a PC -- it's the one component that has the potential to let the magic smoke out of all your other components if it fails in a particular way. It was a cheap, shitty computer. Well, there's the problem. Probably had one of those ridiculous PSUs in it that's rated for something like W but is light as a feather and has issues with driving a load larger than W or so.
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One of those pieces of junk had me scratching my head for weeks thinking my HDD was failing every time it was under heavy load, it would spin down and back up again at random intervals. The real punchline has to be the fact that after I replaced it with a W supply from a reputable manufacturer, there were no more issues, which means the shitty PSU was browning out way below its rated wattage. Yeah, believe it or not, large amounts of disk activity were what was pushing it over the edge. The reason the problem went away when I replaced the drive was that the replacement one was slightly more electrically efficient.
That's why it had me confused for so long, too: The second time I replaced the drive it was happening intermittently enough that it was plausible that another drive had failed on me. Like I mentioned in my earlier post, I didn't see the red herring until I installed the monitoring tool while chasing some other gremlin. It's also the one component that's likely to last across several builds.
I've been on the same power supply since A well-built PSU lasts practically forever as long as you take good care of it and change the capacitors every ten years or so. I feel like if more people understood that, we wouldn't be seeing so many expensive gaming PCs with the cheapest possible power supplies in them. Dirty power is one of the biggest causes of system instability on DIY gaming rigs because the PSU gets overlooked so often. At least in my country where there's quite a few wartime buildings mostly residential but some business, powerline networking is like the devil. Old shitty copper wire doesn't make for a very good transmission.
This story reminds me a lot of this one. That is rather genius.
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This seems like one of those problems you would read in a engineering magazine. I'm not sure what is funnier; his exterior flood lights being on an interior power circuit, or his circuit tripping from his fucking giant ass flood lamps. Those things must be serious lights. I think that was part of the problem actually. The draw wasn't enough to trip the breaker, it just pulled enough to reboot the unprotected WIN98 machine. Old house, old PC.
How long ago did this happen? I hope he doesn't still run a 98 machine when he has that sort of money! Sounds like what happened to my dad. He's a field tech for an international copier company, they had Dell running Windows XP which when they actually got the laptops, that was the most recent version , so around they began replacing their laptops with HPs running Windows 7. My dad's wound up not getting replaced till like when IT had discovered he was still using it two years after they thought they replaced them all.
His management wanted one older laptop to remain for all the older copiers in their branch. So, he got stuck with the older one because he was the one least likely to have a cow over having an old laptop and wouldn't go to the break it purpose route just to get his replaced. Also make sure that the Java, Shockwave and McAfee are up to date. Also configure this 1 tb harddrive to operate on the SCCI card.
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My well off boss from my last job use to tell me how he ran his financials on his air-gapped windows 98 machine. I mean, if it still works for him, more power to him. I have a 90 year old house. For now, I replaced every bulb in the house with an LED light and I'm really careful not to turn multiple things on at once. The kitchen is in the back half of the house, my room is in the front half and it's a modular house so how they managed to wire the house like that is beyond me.
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Microwave was probably added after the fact and either that was the easiest circuit to get to or it was the least loaded. I used to get feedback from the kitchen CFL can lights in my bedroom. Literally opposite sides of the house, and as far as I know, different circuits. Since switching those to dimmable LEDs, it's nice and quiet now. I ran into an issue where the electrician ran the new outlet for a TV an mini PC to Light switch that controlled the hall lights in an office.
Windows doesn't like that. Man, the stooges who wired my house managed to accomplish something almost worse. First and foremost, the range hood somehow ended up on a lighting circuit. Not so bad in and of itself, but then they decided to tap the outlets in a nearby bedroom off the same lighting circuit for some odd reason. Those two facts went unnoticed until the range hood got replaced with a built-in microwave a few years ago. That's when the whole thing about the range hood being run from the lighting circuit became apparent.
At the time, it wasn't so bad -- the only thing that made it noticeable was the fact that the microwave would cause the lights in all the adjacent rooms to dim whenever it was turned on. It was really annoying. Unfortunately, given how things get done around here, we're likely to have the same problem next summer. I don't think it tripped anything, the lights pulling a lot of power when they turned on probably just caused a brownout that the computer's PSU couldn't compensate for.
When they kick on, your lights may dim for a moment. I've got the same issue in my current house, and by issue I mean the power, not the dog. Tumble dryer blew up my PSU. Thankfully the surge is small enough that it took 2 years of use before the PSU blew and we then became aware of the one massive plug circuit , and we're moving house in a few weeks, so I'll leave the issue with the next renters. Now 4, I melted one of them when i plugged in one of those space heaters made to look like a fireplace.
Forgive my ignorance, but how does having a bunch of plugs on one circuit end up frying a PSU? I just moved my computer to an apartment with that kind of set up and I'd like to know what to watch out for. The end damage of the surge was: Some equipment will make the electrical signal on that circuit 'dirty' which can cause wear and tear on sensitive electronics on the same circuit.
If your computer is on the same circuit as a major appliance, think about having a nicer surge protector the bigass tripplites are my favorite or a power line conditioner for your PC. Regardless the surge was never enough to flick the main breaker for the circuit , and we've had the tumble dryer plug switch off from surgers regardless of usage of other equipment that I now know is on the same circuit, so it's hopefully safe to assume the issue is coming from there.
I'm not an electrical engineer, so I could be talking complete bull and for all I know it was an unrelated PSU fault. In terms of what to watch out for.. I'd say make your own map of what's on the same circuit. No idea, you'd have to ask the landlord who ran cable to the shed prior to us moving in and then put the tumble dryer in there a couple of years ago. Heck surge protector might not be the right term. It's some type of plug with a push-in switch, a test button, and some warning that if the test doesn't work, don't use the plug.
UPS systems and computer equipment exhibit leakage currents. These currents are a natural result of the common mode filters present in computers and UPSs. These leakage currents may be large enough to ""fool"" the GFI and cause it to trip. I don't have a UPS, but arguably a fair amount of stuff on 1 socket. Mix this in with most the house being on the same circuit and I'm guessing I've got the causal relationship the wrong way around.
If so, then yeah, maybe, but the fact that it only happened when you used your dryer would make me pause. Maybe the additional load from the dryer caused the leakage from the electronics to become high enough to trip? Dunno, I'm not an electrician. Ah, just a bit more knowledgeable than some. There's only 1 plug on the other side of the GFCI, being the tumble dryer, and we have a master plug for outdoors so most of the time the GFCI isn't in the equation.
The other 10 plugs on the same circuit of about 15 in the house are on the side that'd remain powered, and bar the time the psu blew they always remained active whenever the GFCI tripped. It's a shame it's not an obvious connection, I'd love to bill the replacement parts to the Letting Agency, especially the parts that didn't full break could of been a good excuse for an upgrade ;p.
I guess it could have been caused by the extra load that did get put on for an instant before the GFCI detected some leakage and tripped? Correlation may not be the cause, but quite often a clue. Especially when it comes to non-tech friendly individuals when describing tech problems.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'. The ultimate cause of both observed phenomena was the same racoons rooting around in the trash. In both cases there was an intermediate step racoons set off motion detector, which draws too much current, which causes a crash: I never said correlation wasn't useful, I was just saying that one shouldn't jump to conclusions about causal links like CFO did here: I love tech stories like this.
It's good that he was able to figure out when it happened. That's one of the hardest things to get out of users sometimes. You ask them, what were you doing when it happened. It may not be very helpful but it's a way of saying that nothing is different from what they usually do, so they aren't the cause of the problem.
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Then again, people lie. A lady had called in because her signal kept dropping out for a couple of seconds. Short story short, the dumbass tech that did her install had mounted her satellite dish to her gate, so she would lose signal every time someone opened the gate because the dish got pulled out of alignment and would get back in alignment when the gate closed. Reminds me of one 20 years or so where I had a new computer that had a tendency to crash when I sat down at the desk.
After much headscratching, I eventually figured out it was just extremely shock-sensitive. Turned out there was a hairline crack in the graphics card. This is almost as good as the mile e-mail problem. Finally, they traced it to an HVAC motor on an elevator. When the elevator car went past their floor, the motor was putting out electrical interference that caused a problem on the computer.
They properly grounded the motor and the issue was resolved. For a moment, I was thinking of a much more insidious problem. No problem with any DOS programs". Problem turned out to be a cracked flyback transformer on her CRT monitor.
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When the monitor switched scan rates upon entering Windows, the high frequency audio produced by the broken flyback was heard by the dog. One enterprise I worked for banned this practice as the end users were calling the main help desk for support and to complain about work done privately.
Some of those "You turned on the speaker 2 years ago and the HD failed so the company needs to replace my computer" calls. So they banned any IT person from working off the clock for any employee. The consultancy was just me and two other guys. We'd get these requests and huddle together to weigh the risks of helping out the specific individual making the ask.
It led to some pretty funny game plans. If the computer is in the cellar and there's any dungeon equipment on the walls, code word "Clarice" means call the client and tell him you need to pull me out for an emergency outage. It is going to seem strange but this genuinely happens to my mums PC, if the dog barks near it when it is running it shuts off as if you had just pulled the power I was going to have a go at diagnosing the fault but it is an old q core 2 quad that is at it's end of life I'm gonna replace it with a g skylake build running mint soon.
An Engineer's Guide to Solving Problems". In this case, the dog barking did not cause the crash.
The thing that caused the crash also caused the dog to bark. When fighting dogs, a single raccoon is easily a match for 2 or more hounds bred specifically for tracking and fighting raccoons. It is unlikely that any dog would try to summon a creature that would kill it as soon as look at it.
It is equally unlikely that a raccoon would respond to a summons from a creature that has been bred to track it down and kill it. I thought he forgot about one of those clap-on outlets that turn stuff off when you clap, and had his PC plugged into it. Walk in, t-shoot equipment, outlets. While I'm standing in the kitchen, talking to the couple, phone rings.