Power Outages

There have been power outages here that have been taking down my lab equipment. This affected my new BSD machine. The drive became borked due to an unclean shutdown. After a few days, I got it back up again. It was a simple fix but one of the other machines kept me busy until I got to the BSD machine. The old BSD machine had an IP conflict with one of the Verizon set top boxes...I thought I'd set it to a static IP and when I checked, I had, but the damned router gave the set top box the same IP. I had to run around the house at 11PM trying to figure out which box it was (I've five of them). The last one I checked was the one I was looking for...go figure. A quick power-cycle and it got another IP. I wouldn't have figured this out if I hadn't used ARP. I kept pinging the BSD machine's IP but wasn't seeing return traffic...I telnet'd to port 22 and 80 and didn't get a response, either. So, I looked at the ARP results and saw that another machine had the IP...in fact, the set top box had two of them, but the MAC addresses were wrong on one (this was the BSD box entry...the MAC matches that machine). Very weird but hopefully it won't happen again.

I'll be looking to invest in a UPS soon. I need one that will be able to power down 3 *nix machines or at least keep them running for 5 minutes or so. Dunno if I should also ensure that there's room for the router...