Power went out, good test for my FIOS setup

The power went out around 8:10 am  (I will have to check my logs for the correct time). My Wireless network is and FIOS are still up and running thanks to my 3 APC BACK-UPS ES-350 bricks I have my network equipment attached to (my setup). This will be a good test of my setup and how FIOS handles power outages.

My XPS 720 attached to an APC RS 1300 LCD shutdown in an orderly fashion after it determined that it only had 5 minutes of power.

It is now 8:35AM (25 minutes), I will update this thread periodically.

Update: The power was out for a little over 1 hour, the power was restored for about 5 minutes about 40 minutes into the outage. I never lost access to the Internet or my land line both on FIOS, I did find a couple of minor issues in my setup:

• 2 of my BACK-UPS ES-350 were beeping. I need to load up the APC software on my laptop and plug into the units to shutoff all alerts. It is too bad you can't shut off the beeping directly on the unit.
• It looks like the XPS 720 is set by default to hibernate rather than shut off when instructed to shut off by the UPS. A nice feature, but during the 5 minute power restore the system did not come out of hibernate correctly. I was told by Dell tech support on a earlier call about a USB issue, that they had issues with sleep mode and USB devices which is fixed in Vista SP1. Maybe this is related (further investigation required).
• The Thecus SATA hard drive array attached to my Directv HR20-700 DVR did not turn back on after the power was restored.The DVR rebooted from the internal hard drive. This situation would not be good if I was away since my To Do list on the internal drive is empty (you can only one drive, internal or external). I am sure this is by design to protect the disk array, however I need to investigate potential solutions.

It looks like the outage affected about 73,000 homes in Northern, no word on what caused it.

The key point to this test was that I never lost FIOS, I wonder how folks did with Comcast...

 

Comments

[tastewar]

I have a similar setup (network gear all backed up by UPS), and experienced a power outage. In my case, though, I lost internet connectivity. A phone conversation that was happening at the time kept right on truckin', though. TV was also good afterwards -- just the internet was down, as the router couldn't obtain an IP address. Rebooting the router didn't help. A couple of hours after contacting Verizon, the remotely rebooted the ONT (which has its own BBU!), and that fixed the problem. The tech claimed it happened about once out of every 30 power outages.

[Stephen Skarlatos]

I was told by the tech that the BBU would only support voice so I plugged it into a APC UPS350, that way the ONT still thinks there is power and the Internet is still active.