Computer seance
Started: 2020-11-03 18:08:03
Submitted: 2020-11-03 20:59:23
Visibility: World-readable
In which the intrepid narrator enjoys a second Public Safety Power Shutoff
Two weeks after my first Public Safety Power Shutoff PG&E cut off my power again.
When the power went off I set up tea candles around the dining room table, where I sat with my laptop on battery power, the candles providing just enough ambient illumination to type in the near-dark. The net effect looked like a computer seance, as if I were trying to contact some reality beyond the vale of mortal knowledge. (From the perspective of running my computer and network on battery power, the Internet was a reality beyond the vale.)
For this outage I tweaked the settings on my UPS so it fir our needs
better. I turned off the alarm so it wouldn't beep incessantly when the
power went off, and wouldn't also alarm loudly when the battery was
critically low. This was important because, due to a quirk of layout in
our house, the network is powered in Calvin's room so the alarms would
otherwise disturb him (and, possibly, awake him from sleep to deal with
an entirely-unnecessary condition). (This I accomplished using the
upscmd command, part of the Network UPS Tools suite. The
NUT suite doesn't appear to have been actively developed for most of a
decade, but I had very little trouble getting it up and running with my
UPS.)
The other thing I did was set up upsmon to actively monitor
the UPS and notify me when things changed. I wanted to set up pager
notification for power events in lieu of audible alerts, for the
previously-mentioned disadvantages of the audible alerts. (It briefly
occurred to me to wonder my pager alias at Google was still working, and
I think it probably is (because the pager file is a disaster and never
gets cleaned up) but the first entry is my corp mobile number, which is
not especially useful at the moment.) But the problem I discovered was
that I had never set up outgoing email on my home server, because I had
not intended to use my home server for email. This meant the simple way
of sending myself a page — sending a text message to my phone
through Verizon's email-to-text gateway — didn't work; and I
didn't go far enough down the path of figuring out whether I wanted to
set up email on my home server (ugh) or find a pager service with a
suitable free tier (plausible) or come up with something else to send me
text messages.
The first night the power was out I let the UPS battery run down to
critical; and when it was critically low, about two hours after the
power went out, upsmon noticed and sent me an alert (which
didn't go anywhere) and shut my server down. This fulfilled my
minimum-safety goals for shutting down the server safely (though, to be
honest, modern journaled filesystems are rather good at maintaining
integrity through unexpected shutdowns).
Between the neighbor's generator (during the day) and the UPS (at night) I got reasonable power coverage while the grid power was down; though I'd still prefer to not have to worry about the power going out simply because my local power utility wants to dispense with the potential liability of starting a cataclysmic wildfire.
