Life in the trenches

[Milfmog]

I suspect that at the end of the month the beer bill will show a substantial uptick.

If the consumption rate has followed the procurement cycle then at least the month won't have been wasted; knowing your fondness for well crafted ales I suspect that you will have salvaged some joy from the downtime

Have fun,


Ian.

[Tor]

To crib a line from a famous (or infamous, depending on your view) politician, "I feel your pain." It's pretty amazing how responsive power companies can be when you're in the middle of crunch mode.

They can be. In this case I blame the weather (rain with a bit of breeze) and trees getting to the lines as the most likely culpit, which ultimately does go back to the power company. Rather than an all out blackout, it was a series of short ones, mostly from about 1/2s to 30s. I'd feared having to chroot from a live media system to fix it, but thankfully didn't even have to fall back to recovery mode.

Glad your issues appear to be coming to a close that works.

[crfriend]

Rather than an all out blackout, it was a series of short ones, mostly from about 1/2s to 30s.

A number of years ago I coined the term "to get edisonned" (a parody of the Edison-coined term for electrocution: "to westinghouse") in response to the "momentary blackouts" that in altogether too many places are altogether too common. These things were mere annoyances in the pre-computer world, but in the Computer Age they're a real pest as many computers cannot survive the blip and crash hard. As with most things, it's the big "utilities" that are the worst offenders (they don't care, they don't have to). I am fortunate that I live in a small town with a municipally-run electric company -- and we have remarkably good power; it's been well over six months since anything happened that knocked out my computers. Where I used to live, that was a weekly occurrence. The answer to that, of course, is to dock the Utility the day's consumption for each incident of edisonning. Needless to say, that'll never happen.

It's hilarious to have that repeated back to by one who I did not directly influence personally. I suppose it's entered the lexicon; I'm kind of proud of that.

Glad your issues appear to be coming to a close that works.

I was never in doubt that I'd prevail at the end, mainly because I'm a bit of a tenacious bastard, but it was the frustration of being completely powerless in dealing with a large corporation which just Did Not Care. (Yes, the folks on the 'phone lines were all apologetic and whatnot, but that does not Solve The Problem.) I remain disgusted with the whole affair.

[Tor]

I'll agree on the annoyance of having things go down. Since the utility here is mostly pretty good (as attested to by two month uptimes being possible), with the weather factor I'm not too annoyed with them this time. There have been times when it has been bad for a time, though.

As for "get Edisonned," I like that. Guess there may come to be another point for it to spread from now. Docking the utility would give them a rather powerful incentive, indeed. Even docking them the next 30 minutes worth of consumption after the power comes back on would probably do it handily.

[skirted_in_SF]

. . . in response to the "momentary blackouts" that in altogether too many places are altogether too common. These things were mere annoyances in the pre-computer world, but in the Computer Age they're a real pest as many computers cannot survive the blip and crash hard.

I remember that well. In the early 80's I worked in Menlo Park (an area now infested with VCs and others that feed off of them) and every time the lights would blink one of us would have to trek over to the downstairs of the building next door and flip switches and turn knobs to reboot the Prime mini. We all used 1200 bps serial terminal off that box. Actually, those that didn't know the trick had to use theirs at 300 bps.

Nowdays our big rack of servers all run off of UPS protected power. Downtown San Francisco is on what is called a networked (I think that is the term) distribution system. That means we are fed from multiple distribution circuits. I may help that our local utility is headquartered here.

[partlyscot]

I'd like to keep this discussion going, but I'm in a crunch time with work (they come up at semi-predictable and variable intervals), and have finally stolen a bit of time to read some posts. Last night I feared the title of this post might apply to me too, when the power went out taking my computer with it in the middle of installing a substantial system update (1.5GB download). Thankfully when I tried to boot this morning things worked, though things seemed a little off until I ran dpkg --reconfigure -a and rebooted. Phew. I didn't (and don't) have time to reinstall now.

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Search/Products?Search=ups

[crfriend]

In the early 80's I worked in Menlo Park (an area now infested with VCs and others that feed off of them) and every time the lights would blink one of us would have to trek over to the downstairs of the building next door and flip switches and turn knobs to reboot the Prime mini.

In the early 1980s, when I was just getting started in my career, I worked for a major timesharing concern (sadly now deceased) which used large-scale DEC computers (PDP-10s). When I hired on, a power-glitch was an all-hands-on-deck affair. This was before we installed a UPS that was capable of holding up two 5,000 square foot computer rooms and all the ancillary equipment until the locomotive-engine powered generator in the parking lot could spin up and hold the load.

The worst were the KL-10s; they'd crash with as little as a quarter-cycle glitch in the power -- which was usually to fast for any visual cue to be had. The KI-10s were better, and could usually survive a half-second or so on the capacitors in their analog power-supplies. The little -11s could ride out almost a full second.

The installation of the UPS solved all that mess, but caused problems for machines that weren't plugged into the output of it -- the thing threw huge amounts of electrical noise back onto the input feed which confused the daylights out of the KI in the lab ("my" KI!) to the point where I had to make an engineering change to it so its line clock would nominally resemble what the clocks on the wall did.

I dearly miss having a KI-10 as a personal computer. Those were heady days. It all went downhill from there.
I believe I've posted a shot of me with a KI-10 in Seattle here someplace. They are truly exquisite beasts.