Bear's Log

Last night, and it looks like tonight, have been great weather-wise. A bit of rain and temperatures in the mid-60’s (F). Except for the power failure last night it would have been great sleeping weather :) Around 0130 everything got really silent and then the UPS alarms all started to sound off - the power was out. Now I have plenty of batteries to keep the core systems running but if I’m in the area I like to shutdown systems to be safe. So I started to shutdown the different computers: WinXP game box, Win2k build system, FreeBSD build box (argh! right in the middle of an upgrade), power switch that protects the audio-visual gear and the switch that turns off the secondary hubs. Next came the main servers, another Win2k system and the Debian box – the Win2k box shut down just fine but for some reason I had moved the flat- panel monitor off of the UPS circuit so now I couldn’t “see” the Debian box! I turned-on the powerbook and ssh’d to the box to start the shutdown and started to figure out where I moved the monitor power cable so I could see when the shutdown was done. The moral of the story is two points: always undo a “temporary” power move and label the power cords so when you pull what you think is the power cable for the monitor you don’t power down the server in the middle of a shutdown sequence! doh! I think it’s time to move the Debian box into the basement. I had been using it as my primary linux box but now that I have the powerbook I think I’ll make it into a true server. That will also minimize the chance I decide to unplug it again ;)