Life in the s...l...o...w lane
One of this morning's power glitches took out the DSL line. Grumble. The "line" light is green, but there's nobody home. The phone works, though. I put in a call to Sonic; they tested the line, didn't see the modem, and said they'd put in a call to AT&T; I haven't heard back. I'll try again later.
The only other thing I can think of is that the power surge somehow damaged the modem in some subtle way. I'll ask whether it's worth my while to buy another modem tomorrow, not that I relish the though of going out in the storm again.
The power glitches this morning convinced me that today would be a good day to take advantage of the $30 mail-in rebate on a 1500VA APC UPS that Fry's was advertising. The drive, while not as harrowing as it could have been, was still pretty bad; I ran into two non-functional traffic lights.
I scored the last of the advertised UPS in the store. Good timing. It will replace the two UPSs currently in the server rack (a 500 and a 650) and add some additional features (it has an LCD display) and better monitoring. It can also be muted -- I'll have to look for a similar one for the bedroom; it'd be good to have something quiet next to the bed for my facehugger. In the meantime I can mute the 500VA unit that's currently in the rack.
As long as I have the servers powered down tomorrow, there are a few other things I ought to take care of. Like finally taking down the old gateway so that I can bring it back up as the new DSL gateway, with an up-to-date OS and four ethernet ports.
I should have done it months ago, but I never did get my email moved off the old DSL line. Probably just as well, considering the current situation. Of course, right now it's on my only working connection, but I'll get up early enough tomorrow morning that I should be able to do it before anyone else notices.
Kinda sad, though. The old box is running still Debian Sarge, and has an uptime of 602 days at the moment. One of the reasons I haven't taken it down is the potential pain and disruption of upgrading the household's mail server, but I should have bitten the bullet and done it long ago.
This is not what I'd planned to be doing this weekend.