[clue-tech] Anyone know of a good affordable linux compatible ups?

[Jack Parker]

We used an APC with excellent results.  The biggest issue we had was where
the UPS had a serial line instead of a USB.  Never did figure that out,
other things got in the way, and the company folded before I got a chance
to.  But the USB version of the UPS worked great.  The key was apcupsd (
http://www.apcupsd.org/ ) - a daemon which took care of it all.  Did a nice
job of seeing the power failure, waiting until there was so much time left,
and then shutting down.  We had multiple servers on each UPS, one of the
nice features of apcupsd was it's ability to talk to it's master - the
server which was actually talking to the UPS.  So all servers would shut
down cleanly.

What was hilarious was the day we were testing and got the first server and
slave (client) running properly was the day the power went out.  The two
boxes we were testing with behaved beautifully, everything else had to be
shut down manually.

We also had a bunch of Belkins, the IT guy filled those up, not noticing
that there were 3 surge protected ports and three battery backed up ports.
Guess which ports he plugged the servers into and which ones he plugged the
monitors into... ;-).  I was not as happy with those.

Always a good idea to have a monitor plugged into the UPS as well.
Especially one which can get to all of the boxes nearby, just in case.

With all UPS's you need to be aware of battery life - after two years (or
so) you want to replace the battery.

Be wary of the advertised 'uptime' of any UPS and what actually happens.
They may offer 15 minutes, but with 2-3 servers plugged into it, that turns
into 90 seconds real fast.  You will want to test how long you actually get
and adjust the apcupsd settings accordingly.  We saw servers shutdown within
the first 5 minutes generally - but then that's why you have this thing - so
you get a clean shutdown.

j.


-----Original Message-----
From: clue-tech-bounces at cluedenver.org
[mailto:clue-tech-bounces at cluedenver.org]On Behalf Of Hex Star
Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2006 12:10 AM
To: clue-tech at cluedenver.org
Subject: [clue-tech] Anyone know of a good affordable linux compatible ups?


Hi, I am looking for a linux compatible UPS...basically one that will in the
presence of loss power, will be able to let the server shutdown
cleanly...the server has 3 power supplies, each at 550 watts so I think it
constantly uses a total of 1650 watts (it's a HP NetServer LH3R)...would
like a affordable yet reliable UPS...anyone got any recommendations? Thanks!
:-)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://cluedenver.org/pipermail/clue-tech/attachments/20060606/a7459f3f/attachment-0001.html