Power outage
We’ve been warned that yesterday, between 8:00 and 11:00, there would be a power outage, because some maintenance was scheduled on the power grid.
Because my job brings me too far away to easily handle ths situation, I shut down all systems before leaving home, intending to restore services when I got back. So it was one day where all Internet access to and from my home was – deliberately – impossible.
Functionality ceased just before 7:00, all hardware not just shut down but also powered off. It is something of a gamble because you never know if the drives start to spin (they are of a reasonable age…) and wethter the battery of NVRAM and TOY clock have sufficient energy to keep these subsystems warm. But it would shut down anyway, and I considered it a good idea to have control over both shutdown and restore.
But it proved to be no problem at all. Just before 19:00 I repowered the disks and all stated spinning. Next I switched the DS10 back to life and booted. Ans as was to be expected, nothing went wrong; The system was up and running within a few minutes, and started reading in email that had been delivered during the day (and was stored at my ISP’s backup server).
One thing I found today: the text on the homepage was not restored; that was taken care of right away.
15-Oct-2014
Windows updates
Patch Tuesday has passed – and so I did the updates tonight. One of them caused the real-time virusS\scanner to drop dead. Solution: Run the control program, check for updates (that it usually dows automatically) and install them. Scanned the system, nothing wrong.
Probably one of the .Net updates. These cause havoc sometimes, customers have run into these issues as well….
Planned power outage
In our neighbourhood, there is some demolition and building going on, and that also involves some maintenance to the power grid in the area. So a power outage is planned to happen on 28=Oct-2014, between 8:0 and 10:30. I could hire a UPS for that time, or an aggregate, but that is way too expensive.
So I will power off my gear before leaving for work, at about 7:0, and bring it back on when I return, about 12 hours later. Hopefully, my ISP will store incoming mail for that time so it will be retrieved at the end of the day.
26-Jun-2010
Power loss on switch
Since it’s nice, warm weather, I tend to do some computer work in the garden, accessing the network (and the Internet) over wireless.
Today however, this failed. There was no problem connecting to the router, but the laptop kept sttaing “not connected”. Accessing the router’s admin interface wasn’t a problem either, and nothing proved to be wrong. But still, the laptop didn’t get an IP address.
The problem was that the switch that connects all systems, was off power – it’s socket-based power supply was kicked off the wall socket, just enough to lose contact, but too little to drop down…
Pushing it in place solved the problem.
I think I know what went wrong: I’ve scanned a number of documents, and when disconnecting the scanner by removing it’s power connection, I must accidently have tipped to power unit of the switch. That was about 9:00, and since I didn’t do any computer work all day until 19:00 or so, I didn’t notice….
It actually means that web and mail have been obstructed for about 10 hours.
In the system performance logs that I collect on a daily basis, this was noticable, by lack of CPU and paging – and a steady 75% usage o memory. Which also p[roves that it’s just the Intenet – web and mail, in my case, is the main user of system resources.
Well, that was to be expected 🙂