WINTER STORM

It’s been a wild and crazy week here in southeastern Pennsylvania. In December I made a post extolling the beauty of a recent snow storm. This past week I saw the furry of mother nature as multiple winter storms pummeled the Philadelphia area. On Wednesday a 1/4 inch of ice fell on the Philadelphia suburbs that brought down power lines and trees leaving many people literally out in the cold. Unfortunately I too was left in the dark, but thankfully I have a portable generator. With temperatures dropping into the low 20s (F) at night I hard wired the house furnace (natural gas) into the portable generator to heat the house. I took the power cord from a Cisco 2950 and cut off the C13 end, striped the ground, neutral and hot wires, shutoff the breaker at the house panel and wired in the power cord to the furnace. It wasn’t rocket science, so the following night I wired the water heater (natural gas) so we could take a hot shower. Last night we finally got our power back after almost 72 hours in the dark.

Have a look at what the ice did to the beautiful pine trees in my backyard.

Here’s what it looked like a few weeks ago with light fluffy snow hanging off it.

Cheers!

I woke up this morning to a winter wonderland here in southeastern Pennsylvania with about 3-4 inches of the white stuff on the ground. I had planned to get the Christmas lights up outside this afternoon but it doesn’t look like that’s not going to be possible now. Instead I’ll probably focus on cleaning up my home office and workshop/lab and perhaps make some time to explore Net-SNMP’s trap daemon. I’ve been wanting to write up a detail configuration example for snmptrapd from sometime now. I already upgraded the Juniper EX2200-C from 11.4R5.5 to 12.3R3.4 this morning, only because I couldn’t download the SNMP mibs from Juniper for 11.4R5.5, I would get a HTML/404 not found error from Juniper’s website.

Here are some other pictures from outside my backdoor;