You don't know when you've lost it
I went into the kitchen just a short time ago and saw that the clock on the stove was flashing 2:58... a sure indication that we had lost power about 3 hrs ago. Now I have been awake for almost an hour and a half; and this was the first time I realized it... There's damn few things in this house that either don't have onboard power, or aren't UPS'd. (One of these, admittedly, is the cable modem and one of the network switches - so if I had had a big download going I would have realized this. Likewise if I had been awake to hear the UPS's scream...)
That reminds me - I need to plug the spare UPS in and hook the living room network "closet" up to UPS...
And I do realize that having 2 network "closets" in an apartment of around 1000 sq ft is a little silly. Blame the cable company for bringing the wire in at the absolute opposite end of the apt from where our computer room is, a desire to not use wireless (a good idea in retrospect, the wifi environment here is HIDEOUS) and the use of our file server as a media center, necessitating it living in the living room. Hence the presense of the cable modem, the NAT router, and a separate 5-port switch in the living room (switch separate from the router because the router is a hub, and I don't need packet collisions on top of everything else); along with the wireless router (which is a switch, but for reasons that are probably not altogether good ones, I'm just using it as a wifi access point with the NAT and DHCP turned off). In addition, the computer room has another switch because I only wanted to run ONE length of cat-5e across the apartment, and depending on what I'm doing I can have up to 4 machines wanting to use ethernet in the comp room (normally 2).
Anyway, all the network elements except the cable modem and associated networking glue are on UPS, and I have a UPS for that, just need to find a window where I can down the network for about 5 minutes while I change the power arrangement...
Why, yes, I do this for a living, too...