Well, last night I got up to take a leak and heard my VFI UPS unit beep again (the batteries are pretty dead, I just didn’t take care about it by now), so I walk past the ancient IBM server that hosts this place to switch the alarm off. And as I walk back, I notice something. This machine – as [previously described] – features a maximum of three power supplies for redundancy and load balancing. Each unit has two LEDs to indicate whether everything is working fine (green light) or whether something is wrong (orange light). One is for indicating whether the AC input is fine and the other indicates whether the DC outputs are okay. I’ve had two units die on me over the decades that this machine has been running, and last night, in the 30th year of operation – there’ll be an anniversary soon – it seems another one bit the dust. In this case, it was just completely off, no lights lit at all.
I unplugged it and plugged it back in just to see what would happen. Both LEDs went on one after another – like it should be – but the power supply then immediately went offline after less than a second. Well, that didn’t look too good, so I removed it while the server was running (as it’s the hotplug version) and replaced it with another unit, given I have several replacement units in stock.
Another broken Delta Electronics DPS-420CV A REV.0 (I didn’t bother to clean it, as it’s going to enter the recycling chain soon enough, click to enlarge)
So while it was in the middle of the night, I still fetched a replacement unit and swapped them, it’s just four screws you have to remove after all, and the “new” unit appears to work just fine:
Back online (The top one was broken, click to enlarge)
After decades of experience with computer hardware I do consider power supplies consumables, so it’s kinda fine I guess. Those things have been running for almost 30 years after all, and I put them under pretty high load for at least 20 years.
Thank god I’ve collected all kinds of replacement parts for almost 20 years from all over the planet. Wouldn’t be easy these days anymore…
Another one bites the dust © 2026 by The GAT at XIN.at is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
