The Mandelbear's Musings

Had a power failure at home today -- some idiot ran into a power pole, most likely. Fried lisa_marli's husband's computer, a block away from us, but we were fine. There are two of the cheap Windows boxen that are not (yet) on APC UPSs, (one ancient Tripplite supply just up and croaked, and the one in the Y.D.'s room died when some idiot person who thought they were being helpful plugged a vacuum cleaner into it).

Unfortunately, getting the network back up was another matter. The gateway box tends to hang -- waiting for a BOOTP packet, I think -- instead of rebooting, the firewall seems to come up in an odd state sometimes, and in any case the ADSL modem came up weird and had to be power-cycled. Everything needed to be smacked upside the head for a while before it all settled down and worked. I'd work on the gateway some more, but that means taking it down, so I'll have to wait until I'm alone in the house, or at least the only one awake.

I really need to set up off-site backups, don't I?