Rant alert.

Well, we had a power cut last night. Not that unusual around here. However, for some reason this time, our burgular alarm decided it was going to trigger, at 4:30am (ish). After a while it stopped, then it started again. Being the man of the house it was up to me to sort it out, obviously my gender means I am an alarm expert. I poke, prod and swear for a bit, go out, look at the ringer unit, and it stops. Great, just looking at it stops it. Unfortunatly, it didn't work when it started going off again at 5am. Anyway, I eventually managed to disable it for the night .

It was now around 5:30, the power had been out for at least 90 minutes, so it was time to shut the servers down before the UPSs died (yes, we have more than one). As I get my laptop upstairs to plug a wire in (the wireless being one of the first things to be shut down) the UPS gives up and kerchunk, the power is off, no graceful shutdown.

I have to leave work early so I can get home and get it running before Clare gets home. This inevitably fails. Switch it all back on, the UPSs seem to be fully charged, which is nice. Fire up servers. Fire up wireless, fire up ADSL modem. First hurdle, the wired network switch (where the firewall and the internal network meet, and where the 2 wireless networks are plugged in) just flashes all it's lights. Not what it's supposed to do. Great, have a spare around somewhere. Dig it out. It does the same. Bugger. Right, get laptop from downstairs and plug it in, whilst I'm doing this, the switch magically starts playing nicely. Now we get no DHCP. Ok, check the server. No monitor plugged in, hunt for a spare one. Realise it's stuck on 'No keyboard, press F1 to continue', so I hunt a keyboard, and hit F1. Now we have DHCP. Still no net access.

Down and up the firewall to adsl modem interface a few times. Get that talking to the modem. Log on to the modem. Our favorite 'CHAP Authentication failure' error. Change the username to random crap, click ok, change it back, click ok, and watch it come up.

So now we are all up and running again, but it's not finished on time.