• Announcements

    • Robin

      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
Sign in to follow this  
mlooney

UPS

Recommended Posts

And I don't mean the dudes in brown.
I just ordered a pair of cheap UPS. I got the smallest they had as I only want to guard against short (under a minute) power drops. Damn some UPS, mainly for servers, are expensive.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
2 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

I hope they deliver.

I suspect they will be delivered by Amazon, but UPS (the people in brown) are the 2nd most likely option.

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
8 hours ago, mlooney said:

And I don't mean the dudes in brown.
I just ordered a pair of cheap UPS. I got the smallest they had as I only want to guard against short (under a minute) power drops. Damn some UPS, mainly for servers, are expensive.

They used to be available in 'small' but you are right, it's been a while since I've seen small UPSes, and they can indeed be very useful; thinking my fiber modem in my closet and my router/WiFi unit several feet from any gear. Sounds like an opportunity, but if it was, you'd think someone would already be making them.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Just now, Darth Fluffy said:

They used to be available in 'small' but you are right, it's been a while since I've seen small UPSes, and they can indeed be very useful; thinking my fiber modem in my closet and my router/WiFi unit several feet from any gear. Sounds like an opportunity, but if it was, you'd think someone would already be making them.

Actually, one further thought, those two same devices, just mentioned; we had a winter storm blow through, I saw the lights flicker several times, neither device hiccuped. I suppose they have some level of UPS-ness built in, probably not even several seconds worth, but enough to ride a short glitch.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
5 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

They used to be available in 'small' but you are right, it's been a while since I've seen small UPSes, and they can indeed be very useful; thinking my fiber modem in my closet and my router/WiFi unit several feet from any gear. Sounds like an opportunity, but if it was, you'd think someone would already be making them.

These are, a UPS go, very small,  only 600VA at 255 watt.  I'm only needing them for short (under 5 minute) power failures.

3 hours ago, ijuin said:

It’s probably a good idea for your UPS to last long enough for you to safely shut down your system when the power goes out.

That is why I got it.  Godzilla stays turned on 24/7 and Linux file systems don't like sudden power failures.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
3 hours ago, mlooney said:

Linux file systems don't like sudden power failures.

That is a seriously good arguments against Linux. Robustness of data is a primary concern in an information appliance. I'm not a fan of Windows overall, but it does seem to recover well from external issues. Hmm. The layout of the data and indexing could be a contributing factor, but how updates are handled and when is a bigger issue. Implementing a journal for pending changes can allow the system to rebuild it's intended last state, perhaps with the loss of the very last change. Notes/Domino had that as an option; it had a high overhead in terms of storage and performance, but it was well nigh bullet proof.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
6 hours ago, mlooney said:

Godzilla stays turned on 24/7 and Linux file systems don't like sudden power failures.

 

3 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

That is a seriously good arguments against Linux. Robustness of data is a primary concern in an information appliance. I'm not a fan of Windows overall, but it does seem to recover well from external issues.

I've found that the opposite has been the case, from my days running Arch Linux. I ran several file systems: ext3, JFS, XFS, and ReiserFS (this was before btrfs and ZFS became popular). Of those, only XFS had serious issues with power outages. ext3 and JFS (and to a large degree, ReiserFS) would rebound like nothing ever happened, since they were "journaled" file systems. NTFS, on the other hand, has freaked out on me from time to time under various flavors of Windows. It's the main reason I run such robust UPS hardware solutions now.

FYI, my main file system under Linux was JFS for the longest time. I loved its speed and efficiency.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

My current system has ext4 file systems, and to be honest, I've never had problems with recovering from a power failure this century.  Back in the day I had a drive die due to a power failure, but I'm not sure if that was the fact that it had Linux on it or if it had a mechanical failure.  Still don't like dropping power on Linux any more than I should.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Might have been a mechanical failure—earlier drives were prone to head crashes back before they were designed to automatically stow their heads when power is lost.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
6 minutes ago, ijuin said:

Might have been a mechanical failure—earlier drives were prone to head crashes back before they were designed to automatically stow their heads when power is lost.

That might have been the case.  However a full low level reformat made it usable again.  This was back in the day when you _could_ low level a drive with out too much trouble.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
16 hours ago, mlooney said:

Linux file systems don't like sudden power failures.

12 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

That is a seriously good arguments against Linux. Robustness of data is a primary concern in an information appliance. I'm not a fan of Windows overall, but it does seem to recover well from external issues.

Any journaling or copy-on-write file system should have no trouble automatically recovering from a power failure.

I use EXT4 (journaling) for everything except my backups. Those use BTRFS (copy-on-write) which also allows for compressed folders.

NTFS (what current Windows likes) also uses journaling, but only for the file system's own data - not for the contents of your files.

(Journaling: the system records in a journal file what it is about to do elsewhere, then goes and does it, and finally comes back and records that it is done. On booting, it can examine the journal files and see if any of the "what it is about to do" entries are complete but not noted as being done; if it finds such an instance, it can read the needed data [what it should have written] and metadata [where that data belongs] from the journal file and go finish the job.)

(Copy-on-write: no currently-live data gets overwritten. Instead, a currently-free block is allocated to it and the new version written there, then the place that pointed to where the old version was gets updated that gets written out in the same fashion, and this repeats up the stack as far as needed in the same partition. The entire structure is valid, although not necessarily current, at every moment, so a power failure cannot leave it invalid.)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

Any journaling or copy-on-write file system should have no trouble automatically recovering from a power failure.

NTFS (what current Windows likes) also uses journaling, but only for the file system's own data - not for the contents of your files.

In other words, Microsoft does it half-assed. That is more in line with my initial expectation of all things Microsoft. Thank you.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this