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

[Jack Parker]

Jack Parker wrote:
> 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.

- I've seen people use the serial port with Linux.  And perhaps apcupsd
- handles that.

It does handle that, we just couldn't figure out how to get it to see any
signal on the serial port.  Oh! that was the problem, the server in question
didn't have a USB port - still, we couldn't figure it out - but then I'm
clueless.

> 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.

- Cool.  That's one thing I've been wondering about and since I didn't
- know I never bothered to hook up my UPS.  But it has a serial port.

[...]
> 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.

- Maybe.  The network is the computer.  And laptops have a built-in UPS.

True, true.   We had a data center with 50-odd servers in it, 8 port KVMs
everywhere, banks of monitors.  During the first meltdown (we had several),
with 5 minutes to work in, it was a race to get everything (that hadn't
already died) to shutdown cleanly.  With an active monitor and a KVM, you
can switch between the boxes very quickly.  A better world would have been
to have apcupsd fully configured, at the time nobody knew how to spell it.
(Best world would have been longer lived UPSes).

PS. we were using FC4 for the master UPS server and a combination of RH7.3
and RH9 slaves, there was a SuSE box in there too, I don't recall if we got
that working.  (Also an HP, a Solaris box and a crowd of Windoze boxes,
didn't get to those).  APC also puts out something called 'Parachute' or
somesuch for the Windows community.  We used that at a previous place - I
seem to remember that it also had a master slave hookup, but was difficult
to configure - we wound up giving each windows box it's own (cheapo) ups.
But there the issue was not long power outages - just frequent short 60
second ones.

Dave
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