garym;566442 Wrote: 
> Thanks JJZolx. Yep, that's what I was asking about. The simple case of
> the vortexbox appliance being the equivalent of "unplugged" without
> going through a normal shutdown. To be clear, I'm simply trying to
> avoid any hassles of: the power went off, and now I have to connect a
> monitor and keyboard to the appliance and enter some command lines to
> restart SbS, mount drives, give out permissions, and all the other
> stuff I currently know little about.  If the vortexbox appliance blows
> up, I really don't care about that (as long as the house doesn't burn
> down). I have lots of safe backups in 3 different cities! It's the
> "minor" hassle and the "wife factor" (I'm out of town and she says, "we
> had a power outage and now I can't play music. How do I fix it?"). I can
> tell her what do do with a windows machine (just reboot!). But the linux
> stuff (I'm assuming) is not so straightforward. Again, I'm speaking from
> ignorance on this issue.

Again don't expect power events to be 'clean'.  They won't be.

Despite claims to the contrary, a decent UPS will protect you from most
events: they switch to battery at both low and high voltage within
milliseconds.  They do work: they typically even include insurance on
machines plugged into them.

It's usually not a big deal on Linux, but may be difficult to step your
wife through "e3fsck found errors, please log in as root and run e3fsck
manually".    but then, change 'e3fsck' to 'chkdsk' and its the same
basic thing.

Like Windows, most of the time Linux will be fine from an expected
shutdown.  There will always be a risk with any hardware that a power
cycle will be mistimed and catch you mid disk write.

> 
> I fully understand that power spikes, lightning strikes, etc. are an
> entirely different issue. I do have things running through one of the
> "brickwall" price wheeler surge protectors to help in this regard, but
> nothing stops a direct hit I suspect. And that's not my current concern
> in any case. Thanks again.

again, you will get spikes/dropouts when a car or tree or wind hits a
power line, or a squirrel plays in a substation, etc.

In almost all cases a UPS will protect you.  It may even act like a
giant fuse and protect you that way.

Many 'surge suppressors' suck: they are a simple MOV across the line
and the MOV has a limited lifetime and will give no warning when it has
used up its useful life.  It will just cease to protect you... a decent
UPS will include a proper surge suppressor not a fifty cent MOV.


-- 
snarlydwarf
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