[rescue] Slightly OT: Bad Cap Saga

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 18 Aug 2008, Curious George wrote:

> N.B. the *first* machine that I ever saw with bad caps was from Big
> Blue...

The pSeries 660 (7026-6H1 for you RS/6000 geeks) power supplies were
affected with the bad capacitor problem.  They "let the magic smoke out"
in particularly impressive ways.

The first one I saw just quit working, so we called out the FE.  He
swapped it, and we were good to go.

The second one smoked for a while, so we called out the FE.  He swapped
it, and we were good to go.

The third one belched flames and a shower of sparks out of the front of
the unit (which was six inches to my right).  I literally lept about six
feet backwards and three feet up onto the worktable we kept in the machine
room.

We called out the FE, and he swapped all the power supplies in the rack
after that.  The p660?  It merely logged the fault in errpt and kept on
running.

I *HEART* IBM pSeries hardware.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |