After a brief power drop here, I restarted my computers and — heart attack! — my Linux machine (on which I read all my e-mail) failed to come up on the network. The ethernet card appeared to have disappeared from the system configuration. "Device not found" messages, and so on.

OK, this sort of thing I don't need. What I do need is my mail, delivered to my local machine; I really don't want to have to go to the server and read it there (which I can do from my Windows machine.)

I have UPS battery backups for my PCs, and the Windows machine will do a "graceful shutdown" when told to do so by the UPS. Apparently, however, instead of a graceful shutdown, my Linux box was simply deprived of power and switched off, as if there had been no UPS there at all. Not good.

Fortunately, after I finished panicking, a complete shutdown and reboot solved the network problem.

Perhaps it might behoove me to re-read the Linux UPS How-To.

Posted by Russ at 06:46 PM, April 28, 2005 in Geekery