There are few things more likely to put you in a bad mood first thing on a Monday morning than the power going off at 8:45am. Not only was this minutes before I was due to start work, it was also just seconds before I was about to make my first cup of the coffee for the day!

As usual, I double checked that everything was working fine on the UPSs, and waited 10 minutes, before safely shutting the servers down a full half hour before the UPS batteries would have run out. I wait ten minutes, just in case it's a minor blip, and I always shutdown early if I can so that there is some juice left in the batteries in case I need to bring the machines back up to get some information.