So much downtime!

2022-08-05T22:43

Since I've started hosting shit.cx from home, my internet and electricity has been more unreliable than ever.

It started with the cleaner pouring water into the electric stove tripping circuit breaker. I shrugged and figured that this things would sometimes happen.

Then the power went out for a second or two causing the server to reboot.

I decided to get a UPS so at least I'd feel that my data is safe. I always cringe when I hear the sound of the disks all clunking into their park position. I'm sure its fine so long as there are no half-written files but with so much data at stake I can't help but worry.

Then the power went out for two hours. I think a car smashed into a nearby pole. I really decided to get a UPS. It wouldn't last a 2h outage but it would allow me to cleanly shutdown the server.

Then the power went out again for a couple of seconds while I had the UPS but hadn't connected it up yet. I decided to connect it. That one is on me.

I shutdown the server and connected the UPS.

I waited for the battery to fully charge then I flicked the switch. Clunk. The UPS battery held no charge at all.

I shutdown the server again to disconnect the UPS and remove the battery.

Then I ordered a replacement battery.

I shutdown the server again to reconnect it to the UPS with a fresh battery.

I waited for the battery to charge. I flicked the switch. It worked.

Then the landlord sent someone to do a routine inspection of our house wiring. They needed to disconnect the power.

The router flaked out and stopped doing WiFi. Rebooted and messed around with the router a bit.

And now the internet went out for three hours last night.

I've checked my monitoring for the past 6 weeks and discovered that has been a total of 319 minutes of downtime amounting to an uptime of 99.47%. As a point of comparison, there was zero downtime for the two months prior.

I think a lot of this downtime has been due to bad luck, circumstances and teething issues with my server. I'm not expecting this kind of reliability every month, but the data will tell the truth about that.

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Still, after all the downtime I'm yet to test whether NUT cleanly shuts down the server before the battery dies. Hopefully it doesn't take another outage before I fix that.

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