I'll share an anecdote along the same lines, albeit much smaller in scale:
In 2004 an acquaintance asked me for help with sharing an Internet connection to the residents of his condominium after he had failed getting a common router/switch solution to work. The router was not playing ball unless all clients presented themselves in one and the same subnet, which prompted the unmanaged switch to pass traffic directly between the ports, and that was a no-no for historic reasons relating to Windows and its malware of the time. So I repurposed an old anno 1999 ATX motherboard with a mix of Ethernet cards - the board offered 6 PCI ports and the condominium has 5 residents - 256 MB of RAM, and a low-power passively cooled Pentium III to act as router and switch in one, running OpenBSD with some dhcpd(8) and pf(4) to manage clients and traffic.
16 years later this set-up is still in use 24/7 due to ISPs claiming logistic problems preventing them from installing gateway equipment in the building. It serves a VDSL2 line of 60/20 Mbit/s coming in over the POTS. At its peak the computer had 6 years of uptime. It is still running OpenBSD 3.5 due to poor #OPSEC on my behalf.
I worked at an Insurance Broker ~1998 as the assistant to the CIO who was also the only network engineer. Which I guess made me the PFY.
We use to deploy those mini tower eMachines to the staff, but we'd rip out the WinModems and replace them with a NIC. So we had a box of about 100 WinModems collecting dust in the corner. The newer machines came with 20+GB HDDs so we'd swap those out with smaller 4-8GB HDDs we had laying around.
At some point a 1800 number got decommissioned but the local number and internal distribution tree were still active in the PBX. I ended up taking a decomissioned IVR and swapping out the Retorrex boards for WinModems and configuring it as dialup internet service and used a bunch of those large HDDs to host an FTP Server on it.
I left sometime in 2005 but my makeshift dialup ISP was still active as late as 2008 and there was an extensive collection of DIVX movies still on the FTP server.
Good lord, 6 years? I've had some managed switches with nearly 2 years uptime but 6 is just asinine. I assume it was on a UPS? If so, how did the battery healthy stay usable? Or was the electrical grid there just super dependable?
Where I live, short (usually less than 5 minutes) power outages are common throughout the day. Half a dozen such cuts every single day.
And everytime after a cut and the power comes back, there was a 60 second delay for the internet to reconnect, and about 20 seconds more for VPN to reconnect. Annoying especially when working in teams.
It is unusual not to have a power outage during a 24 hour period.
Here's my current setup to stay ahead of the game:
* Solar panels, with automatic switching between the mains and solar when either of them goes down
* Voltage stabilizers
* Surge protectors
On top of all that I'm currently contemplating getting a UPS for my computer specifically, because there was this one time when the solar failed and it couldn't switch to mains because it was a power outage.
One thing I miss from my student days in the US is always-on electricity. During my 3 year period there, there was only 1 power outage, and that lasted less than a minute.
> Six years without a power cut doesn't seem too surprising.
It depends where you live and / or you might not notice them if they happen at night.
Even in France which is supposed to be a first world country I experience a couple power cuts every month (twice at night this week-end, it killed my tile generation and corrupted my filesystem on my OSM server).
I probably should invest in a UPS instead of complaining on HN !
Maybe they happen when I didn't notice them but in 15 years of living in Austria & then Germany I think the number of power-cuts I experienced would be countable on the fingers of one hand.
A couple a month seems way too much to me. I know for sure my last one here in southern Germany was more than 5 years ago. The only one that I actually remember experiencing during daytime was in my childhood, more than 20 years ago.
Wow, I thought power in France would be great. I'm in NZ, and I'm sure I've gone six years without a power cut. I have a PC that's always on (no UPS), so I'd definitely notice.
The power in France is great, I never heard anyone have so many cuts. The only cuts I encountered is from falling trees due to lots of wind the winter. Otherwise I can count the number of cuts on two hands for the past twenty years.
On the other side of the Tasman they're pretty common due to summer storms. In Queensland having candles ready when we sat down for dinner was an almost daily occurrence some months, the PC and just about everything else would be turned off and unplugged by then. The best nights were when the power went early and we had an emergency Barbecue.
Over the years it got more reliable but I'm not sure if that was universal or just my specific area getting a lot more built up.
Until the relatively recent planned power outages because of fire risk, here in Northern California (an hour north of SF) it was once every year or two.
If I had to guess, I would think it's wildly variable based on location and the factors of that location. A more remote community with one main power line through forested area might experience power loss more often, and a larger city with higher density probably has its own problems with load spikes which may cause problems. Maybe a suburb or medium sized city with semi-recent infrastructure is actually the sweet spot for power reliability?
Here in Gilroy (southern end of the Bay Area) we get one or two outages a month during the summer. Unless it's a planned rolling blackout due to heat, they're usually only a few minutes in length, at least. The Costco-special UPSes I use (CyberPower 1350VA units) have all proven adequate for keeping my work/compute infrastructure online.
I've got solar, though, and a house battery is very much on the list once my budget allows it. I don't see local system stability getting better any time soon, and likely worse now that PG&E has more leeway to shut down power during wind/heat events and the like.
I don't remember a power cut since I moved to my flat in a big city 11 years ago. I would most likely notice because I run my server almost 24/7.
Every month sounds very bad, even when I lived in a countryside in the least wealthy EU province (Lubelskie, Poland) it was never this bad. Maybe once a year (and usually with a warning that it will happen).
It also depends on the status of your local grid/substation. My university was on the same local distribution as a nearby hospital. The hospital had special status for receiving power, for obvious reasons. So in the 10 odd years I spent doing undergrad and post grad studies there was only ever 1 brief power outage during a thunderstorm. Meanwhile nearby suburbs probably averaged 2 power outages per year, typically for a few hours at most.
The power is very reliable until I install a solar panel and feed to the grid. Every time a thunder storm I have to worried as it would happen. Got 2 ups in the house until they reroute the power arrangement in the house so isolate the solar with the household main (by doing something about the fuse sensitivity level). No thunderstorm for sometimes. Still awaiting.
The only one I can remember in recent times - say the last 10 years or so - is when they did “something” out at the Facebook datacenter in clonsilla ...
Yeah, twice in the same weekend is the trigger condition to go ahead and buy a small UPS (or several, depending on how your computers are arranged). Be sure to get one that communicates, usually via USB-HID, so your computer(s) can shut off cleanly if the outage is long.
Power cuts every month doesn't seem very normal to me. I had a home server running for a few years without UPS, and at one point it had over 2 years of uptime.
That's too much. I live in Spain and the last power cut was maybe last summer. It's probably less than once a year on average. Maybe way less, but i'm not sure.
The computer used to sit behind a diminutive UPS, though I don't think it was ever fully discharged; off the top of my head I can only recall two brief power outages here in the last 20 years.
FWIW. 256MB should handle the latest OpenBSD, with little issue (although an upgrade to 512MB wouldn't hurt if possible). The main issue is going to be pf.conf syntax.
OpenBSD has become a little bit more RAM intensive on boot recently due to relinking shared libraries and the kernel to randomize them (Think .o level ASLR), but 256MB IIRC can handle it. Boots will be slow, but if you've dealt with 6 year uptimes in the past that probably won't lead to much of an issue.
In 2004 an acquaintance asked me for help with sharing an Internet connection to the residents of his condominium after he had failed getting a common router/switch solution to work. The router was not playing ball unless all clients presented themselves in one and the same subnet, which prompted the unmanaged switch to pass traffic directly between the ports, and that was a no-no for historic reasons relating to Windows and its malware of the time. So I repurposed an old anno 1999 ATX motherboard with a mix of Ethernet cards - the board offered 6 PCI ports and the condominium has 5 residents - 256 MB of RAM, and a low-power passively cooled Pentium III to act as router and switch in one, running OpenBSD with some dhcpd(8) and pf(4) to manage clients and traffic.
16 years later this set-up is still in use 24/7 due to ISPs claiming logistic problems preventing them from installing gateway equipment in the building. It serves a VDSL2 line of 60/20 Mbit/s coming in over the POTS. At its peak the computer had 6 years of uptime. It is still running OpenBSD 3.5 due to poor #OPSEC on my behalf.