Brown Out Reboots Servers: NVIDIA Drivers Vanish, Ethernet Dies – Sneaker-Net Rescue with a Bare USB Stick

Two identical Ubuntu 24.04.2 boxes, both running ML workloads on NVIDIA GPUs. A brownout rolls through the neighborhood—lights dim & both machines abruptly power-cycle. Unlike my other systems with UPS protection, these servers lack battery backup & go down hard. They come back up, login prompt intact, but nvidia-smi …