That would be a power cable

But no data loss! \o/ Linux

We are having our garden re-done. Nothing major, but we decided to get a local company in to do it. They’re good guys but due to a minor miscommunication they managed to chew through the power line to the garage. What you see in the picture is the cable and the device that chewed it nearby. This caused all the power in the house and garage to short out and all my (no UPS) computers (except the laptops ) to shutdown instantaneously.

After we checked the cable at both ends and made it safe I powered up the house. I then went round and powered up the machines, and there wasn’t a single error or warning from any of them. They all just came up gracefully. This includes a compaq webserver running Debian using ext3 as its filesystem, a firewall PC running Linux and having an ext3 filesystem also, a desktop PC using xfs as its filesystem and a small webserver also using ext3.

After power was restored all services were back online in as long as it took them to boot up. Lovely.

I should point out that the reason the cable looks shallow is because the garden has been dropped by about a foot in height to the normal level. The previous owners of the house (who laid the cable) raised the level of the garden which we’re re-setting.