... and my initial reaction was that profwhat or shane were doing something with the site and I had simply missed the announcement. Eventually on Sunday I read the notice explaining what had happened. This, by itself, was a refreshing departure from the way unexplained outages used to be handled over at plastic, thus good on yous to shane and rich. Good to see that the site is back online and nobody got hurt at the hosting facility.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

Because Americans now need to be more prepared for mega disasters.

I plan to take time this weekend to create another TnT outage kit to include several pages of the best snark, political analysis and witty commentary of all time posted on here, and bury it in my back yard in case something like this happens again.

Another place to potentially get updates is the IRC channel, because the IRC server is hosted by a completely separate hosting company and should still remain available even when the site goes down.  The web interface does usually go down when the site goes down (although not always), but if you have an IRC client (mIRC, Chatzilla, Xchat, etc) you can always point it to irc.treesandthings.com and check the topic of the channel #tnt for updates.

i'd read about the incident at the hosting facility on slashdot, so when, not long thereafter, i was no longer able to access TNT, i actually assumed that might be the issue.  it's so rare that i guess correctly ...

Thanks for the explanation, Shane.  When I first noticed that TnT had gone silent, my first thought was "Oh, shit, the site is down and out and I'll have to go back to Plastic", something I didn't want to do.  I just don't care for the people over there as well as TnT.  I think MayorBob will back me up on that one.  We're both Plastic expatriates.

I spent years working in IT, and we had back-up generators and UPS (it was a hospital, after all).  Well, I'm not going the generator route, but I do have 2 small UPS's here at home, that will keep me going for a few hours.  The beer will stay cool in the fridge for a day-or-so.  Cooking?  I've got two Coleman stoves.  Heat?  The woodstove.  A/C?  I'm SOL on that one.  Few LED flashlights and rechargeable batteries, and if my power goes out, my house doesn't go dark.  I've never thought of myself as a "survivalist", but I guess I'm getting rather close.

there's only one way to find out...

I never hit a totally dead site.  I only hit the status page with a pointer to The Planet's stagus page twice.  This is a highly welcome change from Carl's incommunicativeness.

This status page really should have had pointers to the IRC server and a site status bulletin board on another site.

Of course, if reliability was terribly important to us, we could have a backup site running at a different location, so that all we could need to change is the DNS pointer, but that doesn't seem like it would be cost effective.

With the small amount of traffic presently running on this site, it would seem to me that Shane could take the server home and set it up on his personal internet connection for a couple days.  I would totally understand if he didn't want to do that, but would like the idea to at least be considered next time something like this happens.