Powerless to do anything…
At least I’m not the only one with awful power. For the last few months we’ve been experiencing random brownouts and blackouts. Normally this would just be annoying except for the fact that I run around 20 domains off my home DSL line and my servers get quite unhappy when there’s no electricity to fuel them.
About two weeks ago we started getting hit with dozens of brownouts per minute and all of the UPS battery backup systems promptly drained themselves. Every single server was rebooting itself multiple times per minute and required manual fscks. Luckily I had just purchased an APC Back-UPS XS 1500 for the G4 the previous night so the video editing workstation I paid a small fortune for was safe.
The ongoing power problem on the street seems to be due to a faulty transformer that has been slowly eating itself for the past few months. Turns out that the transformer was overloaded and at the end of a very poor chain of wire. At least the response time for repair was extremely quick (half an hour at 7:30 AM on a Sunday morning), we now have clean power and haven’t experienced a power hit since that day!
