Home Server Projects
The best servers are those that don't appear to be servers at all.
Thursday 18 September 2008, 6:32 PM
Lessons learned or confirmed from IKE
1) I have some really nice neighbors.
2) Nothing beats having a gas powered chain saw.
3) You can't have enough gas to drive your AC generator.
4) Power usage expands to the capacity of the generator.
5) Multiple generators, maybe 2, would be better. One is the priority machine, the other (smaller) is for entertainment purposes.
6) Gas usage only approximates the inverse of load x duration.
7) Most AC generators run at the same speed. (Duh!)
8) A battery-backup UPS with spike filtering to power a desktop computer is OK.
9) A battery powered laptop is better.
10) A computer is better than a TV or a radio for information during the hurricane.
11) A phone line powered phone is a necessity.
12) Phone line DSL beats TV cable DSL without a doubt. Comcast has pissed off customers all over town, especially the ones with “digital” phone service. They went down with the power.
13) Satellite TV works pretty well during a hurricane. It works excellently during the transit of the storm eye. Like a Pioneer/Voyager/Galileo occultation experiment.
14) At least in this environment (US Central Gulf Coast), one bedroom with an small window AC unit is essential.
15) A physically protected water input to the house is a necessity.
16) A solar assisted hot water heater would have been really nice. Cold showers suck.
17) Two layers of shingles is better than one but it still requires a complete repair after a severe wind.
18) A working refrigerator beats an ice chest.
19) Dog and cat food are really hard to buy just before the storm hits. Impossible after.
20) A fully fueled auto makes up for the things you screwed up on. A computer makes a good scouting tool.
21) Pacing yourself is important. You can't repair, fix or clean it all up in one day.
22) Solid-state florescent starters for some compact florescent lights “sing” when the voltage drops.
23) A house without power is extremely quiet. Powered wiring hums.
24) If I was a retailer in household goods, a generator to power the entire store would make very good business sense, at least in the really high volume stores.
25) Even if you don't like some of their business practices, WalMart does know what its doing.
26) Homeland In-Security and the Texas state government are as screwed up as ever.
27) A cold front with a high pressure zone after a hurricane is delicious. You don't need to run the AC and it kills the mosquitoes.
28) Birds are smarter than a lot of people. They get the hell out of town when the weather turns bad.
29) Do all the laundry before the hurricane hits. But make sure its all dry before the power goes out!
30) Microwave ovens generate immense amounts of power line hash, enough to set off a UPS alert.
31) Email, believe it or not, is more reliable than a cell phone during a storm.
PreviousComments on this post
We used to live on Florida's gulf coast, Ft. Walton Beach, and sat out many hurricanes hunkered down in a new school, built to withstand cat 4 storms.
Seeing 40 foot pines trees bending horizontal to the ground can really make you wonder if you will have a house afterwards. I was wondering how you were doing when it hit.
Believe it or not, my dad was stationed at Eglin AFB in the early 60's and we lived in Ft Walton Beach also. Yes that's why I'm somewhat fanatical about being ready for hurricane season. Its also why I have been interested in the space program. I got to walk up and touch an X15 being temperature tested in the environmental hanger they had there. When he retired from the Air Force we moved to Clear Lake City near JSC so I got re-immersed in space again.
We did alright. The roof shingles are going to have to be entirely replaced. I lost most of the trees, all of them chinaberry or tallow trees. What didn't come down I had to cut down. The big oak in the front yard got stripped almost bare of leaves but is fine. An oak tree near the front SE corner of the house dropped a huge limb down that hit the incoming water line and cut our water off for a day. An angel of a neighbor got out his torch and sweat-soldered a replacement fitting onto the input. And of course we lost about 100 feet of fencing.
During the eye transit the entire family slept. I had my mythDVR running on the satellite dish. It was real obvious in the recording when the eye wall was passing over head, little to no signal got recorded. I was pretty exhausted by the time the storm made landfall since I had been putting everything under cover and clearing the yard of potential flying debris.
Even now we still have no commercial power and I'm buying the most expensive form of electricity you can buy, my own! The local wires & poles company, CenterPoint, says that we won't get power back until after Monday. The really annoying thing is that I know exactly where the pole is that needs to be replaced. The neighborhood across the major street has power and they are fed off the same sub-branch as we are. So all they need to do is put that one pole back up and we'll have power. Arggh!
