home router battery backup

Thu Jan 13 17:38:41 UTC 2022

on Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 05:35:19PM +0000, Scott T Anderson via NANOG wrote:
> Hi NANOG mailing list,
> 
> I am a graduate student, currently conducting research on how power
> outages affect home Internet users.

Not a netadmin, but longtime sysadmin, and have been working from home
for over a decade. We have Spectrum cable (still waiting on Google to
run fiber to this block) and a smallish home network, three Apple
Airport Extremes to help get around the c. 1870 era plaster walls in our
house, and a UPS for the modem, switch, NAS, and voice (currently
Phonebooth), as well as another for my work laptop and monitors, the
Mini we use for remote backups of our colocated servers, and a line
conditioner for the TV, TiVo and its external disk as well as the Cisco
TA. 

We've been here twenty years and have only had one multi-day power
outage, due to an ice storm, and despite the five fireplaces we hadn't
had any of them lined so it got very cold (we've since lined one and
installed a wood burning insert). Despite it all, we've never bothered
with a generator; it may be in the cards when we do a planned renovation
though, we're just north of downtown Raleigh in a historic neighborhood
so the grid is pretty stable for the most part save cars hitting poles
or transformers blowing due to wind or ice damage. Not as good as our
old apartment over by NCSU, we lived there seven years and I don't
remember ever losing power. We powered the computers down and unplugged
them once during a severe thunderstorm, just to be safe, but that was a
precaution more than a necessity.

A few years ago we learned that the lights in your house can dim
temporarily but that they should never get *brighter*, thanks to a
recently installed but faulty smart meter. They estimated that one input
was serving ~180. We lost a big box full's worth of various powerstrips
and one Netgear 8-port GE switch, but fortunately didn't lose any of the
laptops or the Dell server we had at the time. The firemen who came to
investigate laughed at us and told us in a house this old you had to
expect electrical issues; when we called Duke Energy the guy replaced
the meter and used his hands to mime typing and said "google 'neutral
burned through'" and ask for reimbursement for damaged items, so it
didn't cost us anything but it was still pretty scary.

So, yet another atypical user, but yes, UPSes and line conditioners are
standard in this house.

-- 
hesketh.com/inc. v: +1(919)834-2552 f: +1(919)834-2553 w: http://hesketh.com/
Internet security and antispam hostname intelligence: http://enemieslist.com/