[rescue] Mainframe on eBay

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Peter wrote:
> Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote:
> [...]
> 
>>Nope. I managed to survive the Great Eastern Blackout with it.
>>Separate UPS and all.
> 
> 
> Your UPS outlasts your power outages? Wow.

I get less than one power outage per year, on average.  I'm in the New 
York area.  The grid here is more fault-tolerant than average.

> Mine seems to be mostly a waste of space. Until recently, I've always
> lived in cities that have had very reliable power, but now I'm in
> semirural Warwickshire it flops up and down with the weather. Although
> to be fair, it's been over a year since the grid went down for longer
> than the UPS could manage.

This machine was the last one still running.  I had shut everything else 
down.  A single headless desktop machine on a 2.2kVA UPS with multiple 
battery packs lasts quite a while.

> The main culprit seems to be My landlord who I share a fusebox with.
> He has an irritating habit of rescuing household appliances that were
> thrown out by their previous owners for a reason. Tonight's power cut
> and subsequent reboot of mooli.org.uk was thanks to an electric fire
> that had been pulled out of damp storage.

This is one of the reasons I bought a house instead of renting.  8-)

> In summary: Rescuing VAX computers, good. Rescuing VAX vacuum
> cleaners, bad :)

Depends on the vacuum cleaner, I guess. 8-)

Peace...  Sridhar