A power outage in LA equals no Rantings and Ravings and no Mercury Ranch.org for at least two hours and ten minutes. The iPowerWeb support page did an excellent job of keeping me aprised of the situation; however, I thought they had backup power to keep all this stuff running in the event of a commercial outage.

Perhaps I read it wrong and it’s only specific accounts they plan to keep running on generator power for three days with fuel vendors on tap for re-supply. If all services were supposed to be met in a power outage, my guess is their generators didn’t transfer from commercial power sufficiently, and the servers shut down (presumably gracefully from UPS).

If generators didn’t come on-line as expected, somebody is getting a crash course in exercising generators under load and practicing an actual automatic cutover on a periodic basis. The under load part it critical and the automated cutover is critical. If you don’t practice those two things, you will be surprised when the time comes to actually employ your backup generators to get real work accomplished.