Hinky’s Proxy Obsession

I finally put the system on a UPS.  Or rather, the system “the system” runs on, since “the system” is a virtual machine running inside an XP box.

A few weeks ago, the battery died in my main UPS.  So, being the idiot that I am, I ran out and bought another UPS.  A few days after that I learned that UPS’s don’t die.  Batteries die, generally after three to five years.

I did not know that.

So I priced replacement batteries, found them to be relatively inexpensive, and resurrected the “dead” UPS.

Since I’ve lived in this dump I’ve seen two extremes of power failures.  The maximum has been 48 hours (thanks to Hurricane Ike).  The minimum has been something less than a second.  And the minimum occurs much more often than the maximum or anything in between, especially around late May when people start turning on their air conditioning and the power company starts switching the “dumb” grid around (or whatever it is they do).

And generally those little quickie power outages happen about an hour after I leave the house and head out to the salt mines, resulting in at least eight hours of no page refreshes and no new proxies.

And one pissed off Hinky.

Even when I am here, the XP box chokes when it comes back online because it has a dead CMOS battery that I just can’t seem to bother to replace, although in my experience changing a battery has never fixed a CMOS problem.  It always requires a new motherboard.

That’s the main reason I don’t bother changing it.  I don’t want to buy a new motherboard.

There are a few bugs to work out, like how to turn the VM back on if the power comes back on at the last second.  But until that happens, I’ll probably ignore it.  Then, I’ll fix it.

And it will never happen again.