It’s a good thing when you can turn the worst situation into the best.

As you know, I’ve been able to keep my email sprawl to a dead minimum in the past few months by using ssh. I’ve started leaving my normal email client in the office closed and checking my email directly from my machine at home. Monday, toward the end of the day, I couldn’t get a connection to the machine. No big deal. I can live without email for an hour or so.

When I got home, I realized that my entire system was dead. Not just a dead ‘net connection - no lights, no power, no system. That would explain my inability to connect from the office, eh? I crawled under the desk and saw that the power light on the power strip was off as well. I flipped the switch and was greeted by a huge spark, pop, and the smell of ozone. Uh-oh. Quickly, I pulled the power strip out from under the desk and started pulling the plugs.

On close inspection, I realized that our oldest cat (16, going on kitten) had decided to, well, moisten one of the sockets on the power strip. It’s a wonder she didn’t just go up in a puff of cat smoke because the socket was completely shorted out. That, in turn, had shut down the power strip. When I reset it, it just fried, plain and simple.

This is where things get good. At that point, with no power strip to protect the computer, I cashed in on a late Father’s Day gift. I bolted to Office Depot and picked up a Belkin UPS. Now, not only am I surge protected, I’m also outage protected.

I hesitated for a bit in buying the Belkin because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find Linux software to monitor the power and gracefully shut down in the event of an outage. Really - what’s the point of a UPS if you have no such software. But the price was right and my faith in Freshmeat was running pretty high.

The best part of the story is this - when I got home with the UPS, the Linux software was already included on the CD-ROM. That’s a nice surprise, especially since the only OSs mentioned on the box were Windows and Mac.

Bulldog Plus is the software now monitoring the UPS. It’s full of alarms, notifications, tests, dials, gauges, whizbangs, gizmos. Heck, I’ve already tested it three or four times just to watch it all work. It’s nice to know that all my development stuff is now sitting on a machine that’s power conditioned, surge protected and and ready to /sbin/shutdown -now when the power fails.

Really, though, it’s called making a silk purse of a cat’s … ah, you know what I mean.

Tony
Steidler-Dennison