[mythtv-users] Power outages and UPSs

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2007 10:20:43 -0700
    From: Brad DerManouelian <myth at dermanouelian.com>

    > I am in that exact situation right now. In San Francisco, we've been  
    > having rolling blackouts. The last one was from 3-7am a couple of  
    > weeks ago which was no big deal since I was home, but we had another  
    > while away from home for 2 weeks. I get back home today and the first  
    > thing I'm going to do is turn on my master backend. I hope there's a  
    > solution to getting the box back on without manual intervention. If I  
    > let the machine just poweroff, it would come back ok. It doesn't seem  
    > fair that I can't do that after properly shutting it down. I need to  
    > poke around the BIOS a bit and do some experimenting.

There's typically a setting for what to do when power is restored, and
it's typically "stay off", "go to last state", and "turn on"; you've
probably get it set to the middle one, so if the machine turned itself
off and then power got cycled, it'd stay off.  Flip it to the latter
setting.

If that doesn't work, check out page 48 of apcupsd.pdf in the apcupsd
documentation.

(Also, if you have multiple machines on your network and some might
stay up [a laptop?] or if you can arrange to have some far-removed
machine ssh in through your broadband connection, you can have that
machine just attempt to ssh in at regular intervals (which will fail
while your router is down, but by definition you're blacked out then)
and then attempt to send a wake-on-lan packet to the destination
machine.  This requires some cooperation on your end in various ways,
though, such as a router you can ssh to directly (e.g., some custom
firmwares for WRT54G(L)'s).  Or if you have even -one- machine that
reliably comes up, have it WOL everything else every 5 minutes no
matter what.  Of course, then you have to configure WOL correctly,
but...)