Mailing List os2-wireless_users@2rosenthals.com Archived Message #6723

From: "Mike O'Connor" <os2-wireless_users@2rosenthals.com> Full Headers
Undecoded message
Subject: Re: [OS2Wireless] Wireless router (mainly OFF TOPIC)
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:10:52 +1000
To: OS/2 Wireless Users Mailing List <os2-wireless_users@2rosenthals.com>

chekmarx wrote:
Hi Mike,

Wow!  That's all I can think to say about such a massive lightening strike and the negative results.  No, that's not true.  I think you just convinced me to do two things:

1] Buy a UPS regardless of the physical size of the unit and find room for it no matter what!
2] Get myself some renter's insurance, regardless of the monthly or yearly premium!

If I got hit with lightening even only somewhat as powerful as you just described and lost my musical and computer gear I'd be looking in the neighborhood of $5 to $6 thousand to replace everything.  And some of the gear is nearly irreplaceable.  The Les-Paul guitar I own for instance increases in value every quarter of the year.  Models like mine run from $2000 to $10,000 depending on age and condition.  Gibson Les-Paul's are pretty much worth their weight in gold.  Go to www.musiciansfriend.com <http://www.musiciansfriend.com> and take a look at the range of prices and you will be blown away.  Even their "Studio" models, which are basic pieces with all the sonic qualities of the more expensive models, they just lack the physical "beauty" of their pricier kin go for at least a grand and up.

So basically, you have scared the crap out of me!  You'd think with all my years of experience of working professionally with computers I'd know better than to tempt fate.  But at all the large firms I worked at we had *HUGE* power conditioners and a power outage due to any reason just wasn't something we ever had to worry about.  Out of sight, so out of mind basically ....

Do you have any quick methods of how-to size up what power-level of UPS to buy?  I know I can go to google.com <http://google.com> and find the info but if you have some quick method off the top of your head it will save me the time of reading and figuring out for myself what I need.  Not to mention the fact that also I trust your judgment more so than what I might find on the 'net.

Thanks Mike, seriously!  You've knocked some digital sense into this old brain-pan of mine, and for that I am grateful.  I'd be sick if I lost even half of my gear!

Greg

Hi Greg,

Luckily I contacted my Insurance company (house + contents) within 3 weeks or so, and they told me they would cover it all under the contents policy, as long as I got a certified "Computer Insurance Assessor" in to determine the the extent of the damage to my computer systems - he provided a PDF report on the damage and another detailing his recommendations for appropriate replacement of 3 systems(3 x HP dx5150MT Business Desktops with Athlon 64 3200+, two SCSI HBAs (2 x 29160LP) ...... totalled about $AU 7,000 and then I had to haggle with the insurance as to which of their preferred suppliers would get the contract - from one of the quotations it was obvious they didn't know the difference between a 68-pin cable/HBA LVD and a plain old 50-PIN SCSI! :-D  I opted to replace the monitors with lighter 17" Samsung 740Ns (1280 x 1024) and eventually by the end of june 2006 I had all the bits and pieces and could start recovering data/software off the undamaged HDDs, and attempting to get anything off the damaged ones!

I spent time chasing around on the web looking at features / prices / specifications and determined from their configurators that the 800VA Blazers (which have Windows 32 + linux software for monitoring and control via RS-232C serial cable - reporting via e-mail/SMS) gave me adequate time to manually shut down the OS/2-eCS systems cleanly. I did a few dummy runs by cutting the power at the mains to determine what period the battery would continue to support two Desktops and 2 monitors - can't remember the actual interval - but plenty adequate!

Any one UPC can control any other on the LAN - both W32 and Linux work fine - and I almost got eCS to install - they're Java applications, but I didn't have enough time to devote to hacking it to work with eCS.

At that time almost 4 years ago the Blazer 800VA were AU$219.00 (can't remember what the exchange rate was then but probably circa AUD1.00 >> USD 0.70. The APC ones were priced out of my league! I imagine prices have dropped in the interim too.

HTH

Regards,
Mike

Regards,.
Mike

--
Failed the exam for
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MCSE - Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert
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