[olug] UPS

[William E. Kempf]

On Thu, September 23, 2004 11:13 am, Phil Brutsche said:
> William E. Kempf wrote:
>> We recently had a power outage that caused my Linux box to shutdown
>> abnormally.  Since then I've had some problems with my ReiserFS
>> partitions.
>
> Uh oh...
>
>> I haven't done it yet, but I assume that an fsck will cure this and
>
> Even if fsck could fix your file system problems (until the last year or
> so reiserfsck was basically worthless) there's still no guarantee your
> data didn't get hosed.

Well, I'm running the latest ReiserFS available on Gentoo.  I didn't know
that ReiserFS had issues like this.  What FS would the OLUG crowd
recommend?  This machine is used a lot for software development, but the
most FS entensive use is e-mail (for which there's a lot of traffic),
using Maildir format.

> A FS that only journals metadata (like ReiserFS) will report everything
> is OK even if you files you were working on at the time have turned into
> garbage.

Not good.  No user was on the machine at the time, however.  The only
files that would have been in use are e-mail files.  However, the only
thing I've determined to have had issues was the portage directory, so who
knows.

>> (The machine runs 24/7 and acts as my personal server, but there's
>> nothing machine critical on there, which is why I've not considered a
>> UPS until this point.)
>
> Power failures can sometimes damage hardware, as can noise (sudden
> spikes or drop-offs) on the power lines.

I'm aware of that, but the chances aren't that great to warrant a UPS
solution that costs even as much as 50% of the cost of the hardware.  At
least to me.

>  A 1.5kVA APC SmartUPS
> (according to my sources approx $440, your results may vary) is pretty
> cheap protection, especially since you can run as many 4 or 5 computers
> off it and still get good battery life.

And $440 is the full cost of both the computers that could be connected to
a UPS system.  Too pricy.

I'm considering the Back-UPS ES 725 Broadband, for around $90.  Found the
following site with software that would work with this (and other APC UPS
systems) and allow shutdown of the linux box (and possibly remote shutdown
of the windows box if I decide to plug both into this unit):
http://www2.apcupsd.com/.

-- 
William E. Kempf
wekempf at cox.net