We had a power outage today that, naturally, took all of the computer systems down.  The outage by itself was a bit unusual as the power kept going down and then coming back on.  This repeated every few minutes for the better part of 45 minutes.

When the outage was over a Linux laptop that runs Nagios wouldn’t come back on the network.  Well, it would come back on the network well enough to get a DHCP address from the router.  But that was it.  It couldn’t see anything.  It couldn’t even ping the router once the IP address was assigned.  It didn’t really come back until I #$%&ed around with the network settings for a while.  I’m not even really sure what I did to get it back.

The whole even vis-a-vis the Linux laptop doesn’t make any sense.  It really should have come back fine considering that I shut it down during the first cycle of the power outage.  That laptop doesn’t have much in the way of a battery and it doesn’t make much sense to have it wasting power on wireless trying to get to systems it will never be able to reach during the power outage.  The system has been shutdown before and it has always recovered just fine.

I remain baffled.

Tags: linux, nagios, power outage