Back Up
Finally I have an Uninterruptible Power Supply on my server! “Uninterruptible” is decidedly over the top, but at least I’ll get clean shutdowns now if the power carks it on me.
I went ahead and got one of the APC battery-backup systems, a Back-UPS ES 750VA model. (This model is discontinued now; APC has a new, more streamlined version with the same general features.) The UPS has a port that allows you to connect it to a USB port, so that the power supply can tell the computer that things are about to get ugly. I still need to set up the power-monitoring software on my Linux box, but after that, I should be all set.