From owner-freebsd-isp  Tue Dec  3 12:30:33 1996
Return-Path: owner-isp
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id MAA09969
          for isp-outgoing; Tue, 3 Dec 1996 12:30:33 -0800 (PST)
Received: from orion.denverweb.net (root@p18.pm-9.pm.dimcom.net [208.206.178.18])
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id MAA09963
          for <ISP@FreeBSD.org>; Tue, 3 Dec 1996 12:30:29 -0800 (PST)
Received: from orion (blaine@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by orion.denverweb.net (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id NAA08050 for <ISP@FreeBSD.org>; Tue, 3 Dec 1996 13:35:01 -0700
Message-ID: <32A48EF5.693B26AE@w3page.com>
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 1996 13:35:01 -0700
From: Blaine Minazzi <bminazzi@w3page.com>
Organization: What, me organized?
X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; Linux 2.0.25 i486)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: ISP@FreeBSD.org
Subject: re: UPS Recomendations
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: owner-isp@FreeBSD.org
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

A wee bit paranoid?

Just get a good UPS system, that covers you for 20 minutes or so.
Do a system shutdown if power is not restored in 10 minutes.
( Statistics are with you on this. )

Realize that:

1: Power _WILL_ fail in ways you can't fix, or provide backup for.

2: Most power problems aree the short spikes, brownouts, and momentary
outages of a few seconds, UPS works fine.

3: Any power outage of more than a few seconds, is usually only a few
minutes, UPS works fine.

4: Remaining outages are usually several hours, and affect much wider
areas. UPS does system shutdown.

5: In case of extended blackout, put phone on voice message if phone is
working. " There is a power outage affecting a large number
of businesses in the metro area. Public service is working on it. We
apologize for the inconvienance, we expect to be operational as soon as 
Pubic Service has restored power. Thank you."

You could put a generator online, but, does EVERYONE upstream of you
have this redundancy? If not, you are SOL if they loose power, whether
you loose power or not.  This seems to me to be a lot of work stress and
money for the small amount of time you may be down. 
(and, you may be down anyway! )

The last time anything like that happened in the Denver area, was 
a major portion of the western U.S. Grid went down this summer.
 Downtime, 6 hours locally. 24+ hours in some parts of the western US.
(  _NOT_ an ISP problem in my opine. )

Prior to that, 2 1/2 years ago, late summer snowstorm, dumped lots of
heavy wet stuff on trees that still had leaves. Trees broke, taking
power lines with them all across city.  Downtime, 3 - 48 hours across
city, depending on location.  Also, TELEPHONE lines in some areas were
down as well.( Again, not an ISP problem. )

Thats 2 interruptions of a few hours each, in almost three years.
prior to that, I cannot recall the last major outage of several hours.

There are Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, ice storms, constuction
accidents, lightning, auto accidents, fires, earthquakes, and nuclear
war that you could worry about interuppting your service...
Fortunatly, for the most part, they are rare. For those customers
unwilling to accept the fact that service CAN get interrupted, at their
end, or yours, they need to take a stress pill and get a life.

Best bet, get a reasonable UPS, and don't sweat the big stuff.
After all, your upstream providor _could_ go out of business,
now you have to get new T-1, new upstream, wait 60 days.....

Now, THAT is someting to worry about.

   :-)