[ale] Preventing reboot on short duration power loss

[Andrew Grieser]

Hey all,

I have a "regular" desktop type machine acting as a server at home that is always on. Because power losses are inevitable, and usually happen when I'm away, I set the bios to automatically turn on if it has power.

However, this doesn't work as well as I had hoped. If the power loss is > 1 second, the server goes down, and comes back up without an issue. However, we've been getting some very short duration power losses ( < 0.1 seconds) and somehow the bios on the server is getting confused and goes into an endless reboot cycle, never making it to grub, or even the normal bios screen. If I flip the power supply switch off, wait a second, and turn it back on, the machine comes up no problem.

Because this seems to happen somewhat often, I need a way to keep the computer running through a short duration power loss. Any advice on choosing a UPS? It honestly only has to last about a second, with about a 200 watt load on it.

Opinions?

Andrew