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From: Brian Leverich <leverich(a)rootsweb.com>
To: state-coord-l(a)rootsweb.com;
listowners-announce(a)rootsweb.com;
rootsweb-help(a)rootsweb.com
Cc: Dr. Brian Leverich <leverich(a)rootsweb.com>
Subject: We Have a Generator! (Was: Re: Power Failure ... )
Date: Wednesday, February 04, 1998 12:57 AM
-- 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