[nylug-talk] Cleaning dirty power

[Michael Bacarella]

How do I turn this monster called wall power, complete with
hardware frying power drops and lightning surges into something
that will never harm computer equipment again?

I used to have an issue with power drops frying my power
supplies, so I put in an offline UPS to smoothen those
out.  Every so often I'd hear them click on for a split
second, and I'd know my hardware was saved.  I thought I
was safe.

Just this weekend my brother's apartment (appears) to have
been hit by lightning.  Every single hard disk his place
has been destroyed.  Including the ones dedicated
for backups (luckily he found some data burned to DVD).

I was going to recommend my UPS, but Now that I look over
the specs, mine, the APC Back-UPS CS 500, doesn't (appear) to
offer surge protection on battery backed sockets.  Have I been
vulnerable to power surges all this time?

What kind of ultimate UPS do I want to put under my desk
(and my brother's) to make these problems go away?  It should have
the capacity for a fully featured workstation with printers, scanners
random network hardware, etc.

Make/model recommendations would be swell.  It doesn't have to be
cheap, losing every piece of equipment in my apartment is not a cost
either of us want to bear, again.

-- 
Michael Bacarella <mbac at netgraft.com>