yes, we've been having windstorms

I tend to think that when they warn about 40-50mph gusts it's not such a big deal, but we did get a 2-second power glitch this evening during which time the hardware clock mysteriously gained about 2 hours -- given the interval, I am less certain that this had anything to do with DST or UTC-vs-local nonsense this time. Buh.

Fortunately I was sitting right there and caught it in time to not have to do (yet another) timewarp. Yay.

Update:
Well okay, having looked back over the last five years of blog and seeing that we were doing a timewarp pretty much every fall for at least 3 years in a row -- missed last year for some reason -- and having also seen that my noting of the hardware clock being on localtime and not UTC was not actually accompanied by some kind of assertion that I was going to fix this as I thought I had. And lo and behold, after grepping the init scripts for every instance of hwclock I found a setting in /etc/default/rcS that I hadn't seen before that actually addresses the problem and was set the wrong way. Whee.

Also found out that the hardware clock, which is only used to keep time while the power is out, apparently only ever gets synched when the system does a clean shutdown. So if every shutdown for months on end is a power failure, all bets are off. While things up and running, hwclock can be wildly wrong and nothing will notice or care. So now it's making a lot more sense why a power failure, say a month after the DST switchover, results in an hour jump.

Anyway, we now definitively have the hwclock on UTC (rebooted while the network was down), so there is now a high level of confidence that we won't be having to do timewarps ever again (knock wood... I suppose it probably would also be nice to know why NTP wasn't taking care of this ... project for another day...)

Power outage

We had some interesting rainstorms today; power has been out since about 10am this morning -- fairly small outage affecting about 25 customers, or so the recorded message claims. Said message also claims that things will be fixed by 1pm, and is now about 7 hours out of date. Yay.

According to the actual human we just got through to, they had some "equipment failure" and are still working on things. Current estimated time of completion is 10pm (PDT). We'll see how that goes.

(Also, even if they do succeed in getting things fixed by then, there will likely be some delay beyond that point, because we're not currently home at the moment, and the circuit breaker on that room is currently off because I have an instinctive mistrust of my surge protectors.)

8/11-12/2009 maintenance me harder

On Tuesday evening, August 11th and Wednesday morning, August 12th 2009 we will be performing scheduled maintenance on the Seattle, WA Point of Presence (POP) through which your Broadband connection is routed.

Maintenance will begin at 11:00 PM PDT Tuesday evening and end by 5:00 AM PDT Wednesday morning. While you may experience a service disruption during this time, it is unlikely that your service outage will extend through the entire time frame. Service interruptions during a maintenance event like this often last only a few minutes.

Network maintenance 7/22/2009, midnight-1am PDT

Just got this from Speakeasy:

On Wednesday morning, July 22nd 2009, we will be performing emergency maintenance on the Seattle, WA Point of Presence (POP) through which your Broadband connection is routed.

Maintenance will begin at 12:01 AM PDT and end at 1:00 AM PDT on Wednesday morning. While you may experience a service disruption during this time, it is unlikely that your service outage will extend through the entire time frame. Service interruptions during a maintenance event like this often last only a few minutes.

You now know as much as I do...

network maintenance, June 10-11, 2009

latest missive from Speakeasy

On Wednesday evening, June 10th and Thursday morning, June 11th 2009 we will be performing scheduled maintenance on the Seattle, WA Point of Presence (POP) through which your Broadband connection is routed.

Maintenance will begin at 11:00 PM PDT Wednesday evening and end by 3:00 AM PDT Thursday morning. While you may experience a service disruption during this time, it is unlikely that your service outage will extend through the entire time frame. Service interruptions during a maintenance event like this often last only a few minutes.

Thank you in advance for your patience as we continuously work to improve our service to you.

and now you know as much as I do.

power outage

Driving home I see a bunch of fire trucks and police cars clustered around on Island Crest Way, with lots of blinking lights, and guys standing around with binoculars looking up, a block or so away from the house. No obvious signs of creative driving but maybe I got there too late to see the tow truck.

Get home, power is out. Surprise.
Anyway, back up now.
Thus concludes today's fun for the day (we hope).

upgrade complete, sort of

and I managed to do it with just one reboot.

Well okay, that's sort of a lie because I'm thinking now might be the right time to switch over to Grub (what with all of the Debian docs saying "WTF? You're still using LILO? .. well let's just say you probably won't want to be by the time 6.0 comes out..."). So there are probably a few more reboots in the cards if I go through with that.

But not until I finish picking up the other pieces that are a bit more urgent --- funny how it's never what you expect is going to be difficult (short story: none of the horrible things that the debian docs were predicting for the reboot -- in particular, the possible arbitrary renaming of disk devices that would make it difficult to find the root directory, LILO getting blown out of the water by a too-large kernel image, and about 10 other fun possibilities -- came to pass -- knock wood). Instead it's various annoying changes to the mailserver config. And I get to figure out why X doesn't work anymore. La la la... Not Your Problem, as they say (and figure that'll keep me out of trouble for at least a day or two while y'all can get back to MOOing...)