You were recently hired on as the electrical engineer and electrical services manager for a small company that has its offices and manufacturing on the same site. Eric, the personnel manager, is also the office manager, and he handles all of the IT responsibilities for the administration building. There are also computers in the plant, but those fall under the auspices of the production manager (who doubles as the plant manager and reports to the chief of operations or COO). And those in the plant do not have this problem.
In your second week on the job, you get called into the COO’s office. She tells you that Eric is in over his head when it comes to the office computers. She explains: “Mine reboots for no particular reason a couple of times a day. It’s disruptive. It seems like everyone in this building has the same problem. You’re an electrical guy and computers run on electricity. I want you to fix this problem.”
During the discussion, she discloses that Eric has tried every antivirus program out there and installed various PC optimization programs, but he just is not having any luck. What should you do?
Answer to Quiz
First, you must be careful with Eric. As he is the personnel manager, being on his wrong side could mean a lot of misery for you. With this firmly in mind, proceed to analyze the problem from a technical perspective. Clearly, anyone who uses Eric’s strategy is just guessing. It is very likely that these programs are clashing with each other and that is what is causing the reboots. Any seasoned IT pro will choose only one such program, if any.
Second, realize this is a professional environment. The level of protection is different than in a home where a user is clicking unknown links or visiting nefarious sites. The main protection is against hacking or unauthorized access to your network, and that is handled at the router or firewall level — not at the individual network node (that is, individual PC). Sorting through these issues, however, is not your job to do. That job needs to be outsourced to a qualified IT professional. Not some cheap service you can access after a quick search online (that is likely to be malware), but to a living, breathing, IT pro who builds work stations and/or services networks.
Remember that first point. Eric must buy into this solution. Frame it in a way where it is solving a headache for both of you. Don’t point out what Eric has done wrong or that he’s to blame in any way.
It is possible this is an electrical problem rather than an IT problem, though that’s unlikely. Still, you need to rule out an electrical issue, and it’s a good idea to ensure the electrical supply is up to snuff.
First, look at how the work stations are connected to power. Do you see a lot of surge strips or point of use UPS units? What about extension cords? Is anything overloaded, daisy-chained together, or connected via a multi-plug adapter plugged into another multi-plug adapter? Any sort of mess here needs to have another solution designed and implemented. Each of these unnecessary extra connections is yet another point of failure. At least one contributing cause could be hiding in plain sight. And there’s the increased fire safety hazard that an unsightly “bird’s nest” presents.
Next, look at the lighting. Has it recently been converted to LED? That’s a lot of extra non-linear power supplies. How clean is the conversion? There’s an efficiency difference between retrofit LED lamps and a luminaire that is totally LED. Keep the lighting in mind for the next step.
Now measure each branch circuit using a portable power analyzer. If you have low power factor or a bad waveform due to all those non-linear supplies, the poor power quality could be tripping the protection in the computer power supplies.
An alternative approach is to making those measurements is to get someone in the administrative offices to volunteer to have his or her work station temporarily located in the plant, swapping places (or machines) with someone who normally works in the plant. The results of this swap will tell you if power quality problems are relevant to the rebooting issue or not.
If you consequently prove there’s a bad power quality environment in the administrative building, how do you fix it? If the lighting has recently been converted to LED, you might solve their contribution to the problem by putting the lighting on its own panel supplied by its own transformer. Or contact the manufacturer for recommendations. It might help to get a date fixed on when the problem rebooting began and see if that correlates to the lighting upgrade.
To look beyond the lighting, you will need to use your power analyzer branch circuit by branch circuit to identify the loads that are causing the most power quality problems and then implement the specific solution. But in an administration building, it’s a very short list compared to what you might find in a plant.
The next most likely source would be those workstation power supplies. If video cards were updated to accommodate larger monitors and the power supplies are now of marginally acceptable size that could be the issue. Have your IT pro check those out.
