I'm forwarding this to the List as information to let everyone know how hard
Rootsweb (Brian Leverich, etc.) is working to keep all of their Lists up and
running through all the bad weather in California. This is NOT a plea for
funds, just thought it worth posting to see how things are being worked at
Rootsweb.
reagrds,
dale
Carmack List Owner
dcarmack(a)eaglenet.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Leverich <leverich(a)rootsweb.com>
To: state-coord-l(a)rootsweb.com <state-coord-l(a)rootsweb.com>;
listowners-announce(a)rootsweb.com <listowners-announce(a)rootsweb.com>;
rootsweb-help(a)rootsweb.com <rootsweb-help(a)rootsweb.com>
Cc: Dr. Brian Leverich <leverich(a)rootsweb.com>
Date: Wednesday, February 04, 1998 2:02 AM
Subject: We Have a Generator! (Was: Re: Power Failure ... )
-- Your message was: (from "Brian Leverich")
> I'm about to try 4-wheel driving it out to Bakersfield or Los
> Angeles to buy a generator. Thanks to the folks who are doing a
> little impromptu fund-raising, and wish me luck with the drive ...
> -B
------------------
I made it off The Hill and bought a generator, and it's now
installed at our PMC network operations center.
[ The trip was kinda exciting, including some of that impromptu
tail-before-hood driving that veteran winter drivers find intensely
embarrassing. But I didn't mind up in any snowbanks I couldn't
get myself out of ... (: ]
For those who have been wondering *where* Pine Mountain Club is,
it's suburban Frazier Park (if you call a microscopic town twenty
miles west of a tiny town a "suburb" (: ). Perhaps more usefully,
PMC is about 90 miles north and more than a mile above Los Angeles.
The climate up here is almost always breathtakingly wonderful, but
every once in the while we have a really interesting winter storm.
Like right now.
As it happens, SoCal Edison has been doing their usual outstanding
job of maintaining their power grid (these folks really are one of
the best utilities in America) and they have people climbing all
over the mountain right now.
Between their efforts, our batteries, and the new generator, we've
had only about 5 minutes of downtime on our nameserver while we cut
in the generator and about 60 minutes of downtime on our secondary
mailserver as we let it clean out its queues before the power
cutover. We've had -0- down time on our routers, the Web server,
the search engine server, and the main list server.
We anticipate no further downs exceeding five minutes for the
duration of the storm.
The new generator isn't exactly a panacea -- the best I could come
up with is a (relatively) little gasoline generator, so one of us
has to sleep down at the NOC and feed the thing periodically. We'll
be saving up towards buying an autostarting propane generator, and
the folks who share the NOC (RootsWeb, Frazier Mountain Internet
Service, ICA, and Earthlink) intend to get the commercial-grade
generator installed before the next winter season.
I'm going to catch a few ZZZs now in case I wind up having to stand
a shift on the generator. My apologies to everyone; for the obvious
reasons, we haven't made much progress for the last couple of days
(and probably won't for a bit yet) on new accounts and the other
chores.
Anyway, we didn't go down and now, with the generator, we won't.
Have fun using RootsWeb, B.
--
Dr. Brian Leverich Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L
RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative
http://www.rootsweb.com/
P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798 leverich(a)rootsweb.com