The  Compass

-- Michael Raymond

One of the hats I wear is tech support for an ISP. I normally telecommute for them on Friday until late afternoon and someone else minds the store the rest of the weekend.

This weekend, the boss is out of town and I am on call for emergencies. As you all know, Mr. Murphy—he of the "anything that can go wrong, will..." fame—never takes a vacation.

Sure enough, I get a page on my phone Friday night around 10 p.m. that the temperature is very high and climbing, and something there requires my immediate attention. So, I drive 20 miles, fiddle with some A/C controls and wait for two hours watching the temperature slowly crawl its way down to reasonable. It was 12:30 a.m. when I walked in the door at home.

This server room has had heat issues in the past and there are generally fans running in addition to the A/C. There are two fans behind each row of server racks and they are generally pointed at each other, which never made sense to me from an air circulation perspective, but what do I know about A/C and fans? Right, enough to write a very short paragraph.

Saturday, I get the same page notice about overheating. On a summer day in Phoenix, when the ambient temperature outside is hovering around 110F, that constitutes an emergency. So, another twenty mile trek to see what is wrong.

The three air conditioners that serve that room are all blowing cool air -- about 72F according to his neat little infrared temperature sensing gun. The fans are still running, too, but it is almost 100F in there. Not good.

After doing some extensive online research, I found some information that offered a possible solution. It indicated that the current placement of his fans - blowing at each other, and some open spaces in the server racks allowing the heated air to be sucked back in where he was trying to cool were overriding all attempts at cooling the air.

So, some rerouting of the fan directions, and an additional fan placed to blow the hot air out of the server room appeared to be the solution. Plug some of the open areas in the server racks to further separate the hot from the cold air and Voila! It took a couple hours to notice a difference, but the temperature was down by 10 degrees when I left.

The point being, some things you should not attempt yourself. Had an expert been consulted on the HVAC and venting needs for that room when it was built, the fans would probably never have been necessary.

Your website is like that server room. Do you have the time and the expertise to build it, maintain it and make it work at its optimum efficiency? That's what The Compass does.

Get your business where it's going on the web.

-- Michael Raymond

Mozilla Firefox is a web browser for all occasions. You can configure it to work in the manner that is most convenient for you.

Favorite FireFox Extensions to make FireFox more convenient:

1. ScribeFire
2. PasteNGo
3. Bookmark All
4. FEBE along with CLEO
5. All-in-One Sidebar
6. Link Pad

And if you use it to work from the development side:

1. FireShot
2. ColorZilla
   
3. MeasureIt
   
4. Copy Link Text
   
5. Total Validator

More information and a comparison of some of the different browsers available is available here