I was messing about on buzz the other day when we had a power bounce. This happens about once a month or so, without mishap. However, on this day, buzz rebooted and informed me that the /var filesystem couldn't be mounted to do errors. He thoughtfully recommended that I run fsck (and even gave me the full command syntax) then dumped me into a root shell session. I ran the recommended command and answered "yes" to the questions that I didn't quite understand (they had to do with joining, etc.).
Buzz continued to boot just fine, and everything started up. However, when I had the opportunity to bounce him again, he gave me the same error messages. I went thru the same steps as above, and then it occured to me to "sync" the filesystem after running fsck. I don't know if this really helped, but I can tell you that he boots clean now.
Due to these troubles I went out and bought an inexpensive UPS on Sunday. Now, with UPSs, inexpensive is a relative term. I got this one, a baby one, for $49.95 on sale at CompUSA. I figure it's got about enough juice to keep buzz, sparky, and one 19" monitor going for a short power outage (less than 5 minutes) or power bounce.
I charged the UPS all day Sunday, and set it up tonight. I was honestly a little surprised that it could handle both buzz and sparky, and the monitor. The instructions led me to believe that the UPS would complain if there was too much current draw. I guess I'm OK. It's funny how I'm willing to spend $80 on 128M of memory, but am shy about spending $80 on a UPS that would protect my entire setup. Does anyone else notice this about themselves?