Thought I would pass this along to let you know the high level of dedication and/or insanity the folks at rootsweb have in keeping their service up. Don't you wish the folks at your local ISP were this committed to service? Brian Leverich wrote: > -- Your message was: (from "Brian Leverich") > > > I'm about to try 4-wheel driving it out to Bakersfield or Los > > Angeles to buy a generator. Thanks to the folks who are doing a > > little impromptu fund-raising, and wish me luck with the drive ... > > -B > > ------------------ > > I made it off The Hill and bought a generator, and it's now > installed at our PMC network operations center. > > [ The trip was kinda exciting, including some of that impromptu > tail-before-hood driving that veteran winter drivers find intensely > embarrassing. But I didn't mind up in any snowbanks I couldn't > get myself out of ... (: ] > > For those who have been wondering *where* Pine Mountain Club is, > it's suburban Frazier Park (if you call a microscopic town twenty > miles west of a tiny town a "suburb" (: ). Perhaps more usefully, > PMC is about 90 miles north and more than a mile above Los Angeles. > The climate up here is almost always breathtakingly wonderful, but > every once in the while we have a really interesting winter storm. > > Like right now. > > As it happens, SoCal Edison has been doing their usual outstanding > job of maintaining their power grid (these folks really are one of > the best utilities in America) and they have people climbing all > over the mountain right now. > > Between their efforts, our batteries, and the new generator, we've > had only about 5 minutes of downtime on our nameserver while we cut > in the generator and about 60 minutes of downtime on our secondary > mailserver as we let it clean out its queues before the power > cutover. We've had -0- down time on our routers, the Web server, > the search engine server, and the main list server. > > We anticipate no further downs exceeding five minutes for the > duration of the storm. > > The new generator isn't exactly a panacea -- the best I could come > up with is a (relatively) little gasoline generator, so one of us > has to sleep down at the NOC and feed the thing periodically. We'll > be saving up towards buying an autostarting propane generator, and > the folks who share the NOC (RootsWeb, Frazier Mountain Internet > Service, ICA, and Earthlink) intend to get the commercial-grade > generator installed before the next winter season. > > I'm going to catch a few ZZZs now in case I wind up having to stand > a shift on the generator. My apologies to everyone; for the obvious > reasons, we haven't made much progress for the last couple of days > (and probably won't for a bit yet) on new accounts and the other > chores. > > Anyway, we didn't go down and now, with the generator, we won't. > > Have fun using RootsWeb, B. > > -- > Dr. Brian Leverich Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L > RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative http://www.rootsweb.com/ > P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798 leverich@rootsweb.com -- Linda Hoxit Raxter lraxter@citcom.net See Indexed Western North Carolina Cemetery Surveys http://www.geocities.com/~alextreehouse related to at least half the county - at least once ; )