This evening two things happened, which at first seemed like they might be related but turned out not to be.
First of all the mail/file/web/shell-server in the back-room stopped working for no immediately noticable reason. I booted it back up (needed to powercycle b/c the attached monitor & keyboard were unresponsive) and within a minute it locked back up, not even fully booting into the OS.
I was about to investigate further (while juggling the kids around, who were supposed to get ready for the school-(roller)skate this evening), when the tornado sirens started. I knew we were expecting a thunderstorm but had missed the briefing on the tornadic one. Bother.
So… with my parents (who, as I mentioned before, are here for the entire month of April) and the two boys — but without M who was still at work — we made our way to the basement, into my office, grabbing a radio and some reading material on the way. I walked back upstairs a few more times to get a flashlight, the pet-rat, and some other bits.
Me being the only adult in the room that had an idea of what to expect and the youngest being rather panicky (entirely in-character, unfortunately), this made for a fun two hours, the last half of which gave us unreliable power which then finally gave up entirely.
The 3 UPSen held the fort for a while, but 2 of them finally ran out of juice while the third (which only had a Mac Mini and a monitor in powersave mode to worry about) made it through the entire outage.
When power finally came back on I had some fun getting my workstation and the gateway/firewall PC to get started again, but that wasn’t too much trouble, compared to events in the past. What was much more fun was opening up the file/mail/web/shell server and finding that the reason the computer was shutting itself down was because the fan of one of the CPUs had broken off at the spot where it hooks to the CPU base and was hanging inside the case, instead of cooling the CPU! Well, that explained the odd behaviour, at least.
The temporary fix was to put the case sideways and place the fan on top of the CPU it was supposed to cool instead of its usual vertical position. Tomorrow I’ll walk into the local Radio Shack and see if I can pick up a replacement. If not, I guess I’ll need to order a new one online *crosses fingers*.
Tomorrow we’ll probably go for a drive to see if there’s anything interesting damage to show my parents. How out-of-character of us! But hey, hopefully this will be one of the (very) few opportunities in their life to see tornado damage from up-close, might as well get a glance at it. 
And now, with everything working mostly as intended again, I say goodnight.
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