So the day started waiting for the rain to stop. It didn’t. So I waited for Lisa to turn up then took the dog out then, thankfully the rain held off.

Moved on to lunch, salad sandwich, why break a tradition even if it is a bank holiday.

Then moved on to NUT and configuring UPS scripts. To be fair I didn’t really have any issue with NUT itself, just the Belkin driver. There is a modified driver that I just completely failed to get working under Ubuntu. In the end I went for the USB driver as well it’s just a bit more modern. The problem with the Belkin UPS is that it doesn’t support a soft shutdown, in other words if the mains fails and the UPS goes critical and shuts the server down then when the mains comes back up, bugger all happens, the UPS stays shut down. The only way round it is to get the server to the point just before halt, then just sit there and wait. If the mains comes back on, wait for a maximum of about 20 minutes then perform a reboot. If the UPS fails then the server just shuts off. Now, if the mains comes back up the UPS does the decent thing and powers everything up. Now this is all jolly except for one fly in the ointment. If the UPS monitor has remotely shut down the pfSense box on a critical, if the mains is reapplied before the battery is exhausted then the server will reboot but the pfSense box will remain shut down. I think the solution here is wake on lan, one for another night.

Yesterday I probably ate too much and appeared to put on 4 pound by this morning, but today I’m about 1000 calories under (after running 51 minutes this afternoon) and been nothing but shitting all day. I feel backed up like the Severn Tunnel. So lets see how long it takes to drop those 4 pounds again.