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.
Was "asinine" the word you meant there? It doesn't make sense to me in context.
I envy all of you.
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.
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 !
I live in France and my power cuts are less than 10 in +20 years.
Had +5 years of uninterrupted power at my previous place and at the current flat I live, it's currently at +1,5 years.
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.
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?
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.
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).
Power is a funny thing for computer guys.
I now live in Dublin and I've had one in 6 years.
I live in a block with a bad circuit, and we have brief <5min outages at least once a week.
I dont like it because it makes my microwave's clock unusable.
Neighbours one block away don't have that many outages.
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.