Brownouts, shorts, explosions and the unix pc.

[David Neill-OKCy Mktg 405-278-4007]

As an aside to this discussion, I lost my power supply (3b1, 245W)
to a series of power dropouts (about 8 times in 30 seconds) last
weekend.  The system has a decent surge protector, and has survived
dozens of power drop-outs before, but none (that I know of) where
the power came back on and went back off that many times in such a
short period.  I was in another room, and by the time I got to 
the 3b1, it was too late.

Anyway, before bringing it back up (with new power supply), I
got a commercial power relay (16 amps!), and wired the power to
the relay coil through the contacts of the relay.  This way,
when the power drops once, the relay contacts open, and no more
power flows to the machine until I manually reset the relay.
This contraption is connected to the wall socket, in front of
everything else.  At least I won't get this kind of "series hits"
in the future.

I call this thing a "power interrupt safety switch", and am thinking
of marketing it... "Commercial power problems?  PISS on it" :-)
A UPS would be ideal, but somehow, there's always a higher
priority for my limited funds.

I fixed the boot-up procedure to prevent "fsck -y" some time back,
and thankfully, the disk was ok.  (Thanks, Lenny)
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