Centrale LAN Stabilized Anew

Image by orcmid via Flickr

In When the Backup is the Failure, I had the ironic experience of it being the backup system that appeared to be weak link in my protection of the Centrale LAN from on-premise outages.

On Monday, May 10, I quickly obtained another battery-backup unit and reconnected it to the network units, including the HP MediaSmart Server with its Windows Home Server system.

The network center is shown with the new battery backup, the WHS, my DSL modem, and the stack consisting of my residential gateway/router, a wireless access point, and a hub for aditional LAN connections.

The idea is to have sustained power on the network so that connections of other computers to the LAN and from there to the Internet or the WHS can complete their operations and shut down in an orderly manner.  The battery-backup indicates that, with the ordinary light load, there is enough power to sustain network and WHS operation for about 90 minutes.

I don't know, at this point, how the other battery-backup failed.  It was an older model and did not provide the visible indicators and self-test capabilities of its replacement.  It may well have been on battery and the battery ran down without being noticed.  That's an odd situation and I suspect that what I will end up doing is removing the batteries and taking them to the municipal disposal and recycling center.  If not, I will have a battery-backup battery backup.

As long as I was replenishing, I also picked up an addition 1 TB drive for the WHS and an external drive for backing up the folders of the WHS off-site.  Those are my next projects for the LAN itself.