Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 9 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

We had a quiet, relaxing, electricity-free evening last night thanks to a 5 and a half hour power outage in our neighborhood.

It was remarkable how quiet it was in the house without all the white noise we are used to: the bubbling of the aquarium, the hum of the refrigerator and the air conditioning, etc. My daughter found the whole thing entertaining and proposed the idea that we should have one electricity-free evening every month (candles, flashlights, no TV, etc.). I think we’re actually going to try that.

From the tech side of outage: I run NUT on my Ubuntu server that hosts windracer.net so I know the UPS switched over to battery at 4:52pm yesterday afternoon when the outage started because upsmon sent me an e-mail. At the same time, Nagios started reporting (also via e-mail) that my office printer, my TiVo HD, and wireless bridge were down. Those are in a different room so I knew it was the entire house without power and not just the circuit to the computer closet. 15 minutes later, NUT gracefully shut down my NAS (a Buffalo LinkStation 250 running the OpenLink firmware), and then the server itself as the UPS reached a low-battery state. I’m using a 750VA UPS in the closet to power the modem, router, NAS, and server, and NUT reports only a 40% load for a 14 minute battery run-time. That seems a little low so I might need to look into replacing that unit. Everything booted up normally when the power came back on at 10:18pm.

Before upgrading the server to Hardy Heron two weeks ago, my uptime record was 135 days. So much for my own personal five 9s of uptime. 😀