[vox-tech] NAS/Printer Server/Web Server?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Alex Mandel (tech_dev at wildintellect.com):

[Interesting details about hardware options you're considering:]

> Note to self: For some reason I'd never really thought about the fact
> that you should put such a device on a UPS. In hindsight, this is
> probably what killed my previous NAS drive. 

Are you thinking it was a power surge / spike or low-voltage line
condition that fried the drive?

Out here on the Left Coast, serious line-power problems are pretty rare,
especially compared to what, say, LILCO customers have to put up with
in the NYC area.  But the matter is worth pondering.

I have for a couple of decades run full-service *ix servers at my
residences on (variously) T-1 and broadband, so I weigh some of the same
concerns you do.  In April 2009, the machine then running
linuxmafia.com, a 1998-era VA Research model 500 2U server I literally
rescued from a dumpster one day around year 2000 while working at VA
Linux Systems, got fried during a late-spring lightning storm, and I
hastily replaced it with a slightly less ancient VA Linux model 2230.
That's the only time I've ever lost hardware from AC power fluctuations
(in the Bay Area, anyway).

Back in summer 2001, when California went through rolling blackouts, I
pondered getting a UPS but decided it would be solving the wrong
problem:  My suffering small amounts of downtime when PG&E lost power
was OK as long as the machine came back up.  So, the missing ingredient
was reliable journaling filesystems, and I figured out how to migrate my
system from ext2 to XFS.  (See 'XFS Conversion' on
http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Filesystems .  To explain, ext3 was not then
production-ready.)

Still, it's bothered me to have my hardware, particularly HDs, exposed
to PG&E-caused damage _if_ that actually happens.  So, I went shopping
-- and _still_ found UPSes to be a solution to the wrong problem.
Instead, I bought an APC-branded power filtering / conditioning unit,
thereby addressing the power-quality issue without saddling me with a
failure-prone lead-acid battery.


Also, having recently bought an external (USB/Firewire) 2 TB drive and
been astonished by the low cost, I'm considering buying a second one of
those (to make a RAID1 pair) and, say, a ShivaPlug to replace the model
2230:  That would cut the electricity hit to almost nothing -- and still 
let me use standard Debian on real mass storage.

Anyway, think twice before putting printers on your UPSes (if that's
part of what you're considering), as many printers draw gobs of power
when in service, and are not typically an essential service you need
running during power outages.