[PLUG] power hit... am I screwed?

[Anthony Schlemmer]

Yep I went through great efforts to avoid paying $40.00 a pop from APC 
for signaling cables for my BackUPS units. I made my own for a couple 
dollars in parts from a second-hand electronic. I also put together a 
monitoring daemon based-on code from the UPS-HOW that works with the 
dumb APC BackUPS units.

The daemon signals when the power goes out and when the power is 
restored assuming the system is still up. I'm real conservative so I 
don't drain the battery to low and use a 2 minute timed shutdown that 
shuts a system down if the power isn't restored. If the power is 
restored before the shutdown commences the shutdown is canceled. So far 
this setup has worked pretty well since most timess the power goes out 
for a few seconds or has a momentary sag so the shutdown is canceled 
and the system continues to run.

I also had a Tripp-Lite unit from Costco that also included a signaling 
cable and monitoring software for Linux but there was some problem with 
the charging of the battery. After a few weeks there was a noticable 
bubbling sound, burning smell, and finally a whistling sound like gas 
was venting from the battery or something. The fault light also came on 
the unit and so back to Costco it went. After after leaving Costco I 
headed to my favorite computer store with my return money and ordered a 
more expernsive APC SmartUPS unit.

The APC SmartUPS unit I got included the signaling cable and also a 
version of APC's Powerchute software that even had a version for Linux 
on the CD. I got a newer version of PowerChute off of APC's website.

Tony

On Thursday 25 July 2002 05:13 am, Ed Sawicki wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-07-24 at 23:26, Sandy Herring wrote:
> > The power failed while I was a work today. Fat lot of good the UPS
> > did.
>
> A UPS will not help when the power outage is longer than your
> battery reserves and you've not setup your system for power fail.
> You need to connect your UPS to your computer with a signal cable,
> run a power fail daemon (such as powerd), and check the power
> fail settings in your /etc/inittab file.
>
> Putting /var on a separate partition formatted with ext3 or Reiserfs
> is also a good idea.
>
> Ed
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug

-- 
Anthony Schlemmer
aschlemm at attbi.com
>>>>This machine was last rebooted:  30 days 14:29 hours ago<<