It sure got quiet here quick. Not at all surprising how some of the same methods used for gold price suppression have been aimed at Bitcoin and had the same result of knocking prices down; not through any issue with Bitcoin itself, but the surrounding infrastructure.

Bear in mind that router board (which runs the cgminer software and management front end) is NOT the control board. What I mean by the control board is the Spart6 FPGA board that takes the instructions from the cgminer software running on the router board and coverts that to work batches for the ASICS. The control board is the one with all the "IDE like" cables running out of it and to the individual hashing modules. The control board does not respond to ping requests because it is not accessible via any network protocols as it's attached to the router board via USB. The router board responds to ping request and I'd imagine it would also respond to ping request even if the mining software is not running or in some sort of locked up or crashed state. If the router's OS was completely down or broken then yes it would not respond to ping requests. The power control devices - dataprobe - are of limited use in this scenario. They are still useful for when you want to quickly power cycle the machine for whatever reason.

It would be neat if they made a 2 socket version of the iBoot-G2. The reason for 2 is that ideally you'd want 2 Avalon units per 15 Amp circuit. The one with multiple power sockets has only 1 power in cable.

Edit: Ooops..seems there is a iBoot-G2+ which allows you to control up to 3 power outlets. Neat!

Also in regards to the avalon unit coming back online from a power outage, sometimes that does not happen. Rarely what could happen is the unit will be left in a zombie like state because the control board did not initialize properly. For me this happened once when there was a brownout.

Well I think the main problem with putting a UPS behind these things is that they're absolute power consumption monsters and it takes one beefy ass UPS to feed them for a reasonable amount of time - enough to last the average blackout.

I was thinking of getting some 1440 or 1500VA units. Haven't pulled the trigger yet though. Where did galambo and Death & Taxes discuss this?

It uses an atx power supply from a computer. It has an on off switch. You flip it on, it turns on.

maybe someone built kingdoms around fiat money but they are currently loosing it and not because of bitcoin but because they printed too much fiat and took too much debt. Bitcoin actually can save them if they will use it correctly.