I Improved My Town

**Marco Arment** (0:00)
Coincidentally, I was going on the ferry back to the mainland, John, yesterday.

**John Syracuse** (0:05)
I'm just going to always say New Jersey every time you say that until you stop. New Jersey?

**Marco Arment** (0:09)
So as I'm on the boat, I get an alert that all of my transcription servers in the data center are offline.

**Casey Liss** (0:17)
Oh, that's fun.

**Marco Arment** (0:18)
So all the Mac Minis. And I'm like, huh. Now, fortunately, they aren't literally all in that one data center. I have a few that are at CyberLynk, which is Mac Mini Vault, I believe, is their name for that, but it's CyberLynk is like the company behind it. So I have a few at CyberLynk and I have a few in my house. And because transcripts are prioritized based on the show's popularity, and I have something like 12-ish total Macs that are not in the data center, I can go without some of them for a while. And you might not notice because the popular shows are still getting transcribed. And so anyway, so I'm on the boat and I get all this alerts. I'm like, huh. OK, so I do some quick diagnosis of like, can I can I remote desktop to any of them? Can I say to any of them? No.
I open up the Unifi Ubiquiti portal thing of like their site manager. It's like, and it says the entire Unifi console is offline. Hmm. That's not great. So I'm like, well, looks like I'm stopping at the data center on the way home.
So I show up and I go into the cage and everything is off. Like, the power is off. All of the power lights are off to everything, including the console and everything.

**Casey Liss** (1:31)
Hold on. Let me stop you there. To get into the cage, you have to pass through humans, right? So when you say...

**Marco Arment** (1:37)
Oh, no, definitely not. I have to pass through with like a key card. A data center does not typically have a ton of humans walking around.
At least not, you know, it's like, there's like one guy at a security desk at the beginning who, you know, you like wave to and that's it. But then, yeah, but between me, between the entry door to the building and the room that contains the servers, there's like four or five key card doors.

**Casey Liss** (2:03)
I see.

**Marco Arment** (2:03)
And you need the key card and the pin for most of them. So like it's a good amount of security because, you know, like data center, like who rents servers in a small data center like this? It's like banks and, you know, government offices, you know, they have like compliance and security requirements and everything. So there's a lot of, you know, a lot of security and logging and everything.

**Casey Liss** (2:22)
So, but what I'm driving at is when you say that the cage was off, you're not talking about like the entirety of the data center. You're talking about your particular rack in the data center.

**Marco Arment** (2:32)
Yeah, everyone else was fine. So my rack is just everything's off. And I'm like, hmm, that's not great. So, you know, I opened the door and even the door also had, like there's like a big like swinging, like cage metal door that also has the keypad scanner on it front and back. So, you know, nobody else who has access to the data center room with servers in it can access my servers unless they have my key card, you know, like so it's. And I can't access everyone else's, which again, for security, that's that's a good thing. So anyway, so I figure out that member, I had mentioned when I was describing how I had to learn all this stuff and all, you know, all the stuff I didn't know, I mentioned a couple of things. One thing I mentioned is that data centers all use 220 volts, which I didn't know. So everything has to be like dual voltage, which most stuff is, which is fine. And also that it's fed from two different banks of power. Yeah. And you have to have a transfer switch. Anything that does not have to power supplies, you have to have an automatic transfer switch that intelligently basically keeps everything plugged into one source. And then if that source goes away, it instantly switches to the other source, kind of like a UPS with no battery, just switching between two different power sources.
Well, my ATS was dead. So the power switch thing is just I go and it's like blinking some weird lights and it's totally dead. Well, that's the problem. Okay.