On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 21:58, ZephyrQ wrote: > On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 23:20, Mark L. Kahnt wrote: > > On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 21:31, ZephyrQ wrote: > > > For the past few months, my UPS has 'blinked out' on me. The rest of > > > the power in the house was fine, but the items plugged into the UPS have > > > tripped, causing the usual confusion and 20+ minute boot up sequence (12 > > > partitions, 90+ Gigs of hda/b including manually running fsck on my /var > > > partition). > > > Thanx. > > > > > To be clear on this - the power from the UPS to the devices plugged into > > it is failing, so you don't get a clean shutdown? That sounds like the > > circuitry between the power regulator portion and the power distribution > > area of the UPS has a faulty point. If it is still under warranty, > > contact the manufacturer - the puppy is broken. The UPS should help you > > avoid outages or permit clean shutdowns when they do happen - it > > shouldn't introduce its own outages to the mix. > > Yes...the problem is from the UPS. I works fine for the 1-5 second > 'cutouts' we get out here in rural Arkansas. But I will be > working/playing/browsing along and it will 'trip' and beep--causing me > to reboot from a turned off machine. Okay - how long between the "trip and beep" and the power being gone altogether? > > A related question, will grounding/lack of grounding cause this? I > just discovered that the room I use has a ceiling fan NOT > grounded...and that the CPU isn't grounded either (even though plugged > into the UPS). > (IANA-Electrician) I'd think that is more of a problem around surges, brown-outs and static electricity, rather than the whole kit and kaboodle blinking out - particularly because the UPS is supposed to switch to the battery in those situations, and feed the system. That said, grounding is A GOOD THING for anything that asks for it. > > > Does the UPS unit work roughly correctly when you pull the plug from the > > wall? The only alternative that comes to mind is that the circuits might > > be sensing a brown-out or power surge, switching to battery during the > > power trouble, and the battery is not working - hence it just drops > > power to the devices immediately. What make is the UPS, and what > > software are you using to monitor it? > > It's a Connext Battery Backup 300. No software monitoring as there > wasn't any linux stuff for it available when I bought it (back in my > SuSE days...). To be honest, I've never really pursued it when moving > to Debian. > Monitoring software is also A GOOD THING - you might want to give something like genpower, nut or powstatd if it uses a serial cable back to the computer - then when an extended power outage happens, the system will be able to monitor how much power is left, and kick in an orderly shutdown while there is still enough to see it through. It won't tell you anything while the power to the system is out (well, the info is there, but your computer won't be able to use it) but you can check after to see if possibly a battery discharge happened. > > Beyond that, switch to a journal-based file system on those larger > > volumes to speed up recovery. I use ext3 on /var, and it has yet to have > > a discernable problem, either with lost data, or a huge journal to > > replay. > > I've been wondering, is the switch to ext3 going to cause many > problems? I don't have a lot of time to fix problems right now... > tune2fs -J <partition> takes next to no time to run, and with the next restart is ready to go (remember to switch /etc/fstab to mount the partition as ext3 rather than ext2) and runs automatically in place of a full fsck following a bad shutoff/crash. The system will still run fsck periodically, but that will hopefully sync up with a proper shutdown, and thus run very quickly - under five minutes rather than over 20 for the entirety of the system. > Thanx for the help. > > -- Mark L. Kahnt, FLMI/M, ALHC, HIA, AIAA, ACS, MHP ML Kahnt New Markets Consulting Tel: (613) 531-8684 / (613) 539-0935 Email: kahnt@hosehead.dyndns.org
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