You’re sitting in a small room with one of those cool TV bombs. It’s just you and google. You have found a bunch of tutorials on disarming bombs. You’re a reasonably technical person and you were smart enough to google the issue so you have that going for you. The timer has 60 seconds left before it makes you unidentifiable. You are reasonably confident from all your reading you just need to cut that red wire. The problem is if that’s not correct BOOM!. If you are going to be on the wall either way you may as well just go for it as doing it or not doing it will likely net the same results with your current knowledge.
The better alternative of course is not to be the person with their neck on the line. You probably should have called 911 and had the professionals come out. Turns out they don’t cut wires they use a robot and pour liquid nitrogen on it. They know if you freeze the circuit it will stop functioning AND if they are wrong they loose a robot, not a life.
Okay that was fun, but what’s the point. I have been seeing various posts about High Availability with your phone systems. Like the example above there are 100+ examples online of how to do it. You could piece together those examples and be reasonably confident that you have it.
If this is “Joe’s Gas Station and Muffin shop.” this is probably OK. Someone may not get to call in and see if you are out of blueberry muffins. If you are a Emergency operations center this mistake could cost someone their life.
I am a strong supporter of tinkering, hacking and playing with technology. I built a system called "Dial-a-Distro where you would put a CD (ok kids CD’s are like DVD’s but hold music) in the drive, pick up a phone and when prompted select your desired Distro. Why? Why not! But no one’s life, business, reputation, or finances were on the line.
If you need High availability don’t guess at it. It down time means loss of life or wads of cash get your HA done by professionals. People who have the knowledge of what wire to cut but the wisdom to pour nitrogen on the bomb from a distance.
Read more on HA solutions here.