Having hopefully sorted out my power failure protected timer issue as per a series of previous posts I'm now turning my attention to protecting my desktop PCs that run Windows 7 Professional.
Is it a major task to get the PC to monitor the UPS battery and shut down when the level is critical? I will almost certainly go with a major brand such as APC (unless advised to the contrary) and I believe most of their offerings have a USB port for this purpose.
Has anyone first hand experience of doing this? Are there any gotcha's ?
I've have an APC UPS for many years and I initially used their software. However the software they supplied was defective in that it included a short-dated security certificate. The first I knew was when my internet access suddenly started behaving oddly for no apparent reason. It took me several days concentrated work (restoring my system one application at a time) to discover the cause of the problem, and although APC admitted what had happened, they didn't seem particularly bothered about the disruption they'd caused their customers.
So I removed the APC software and resolved to avoid that brand in future. The incident made me wonder whether that auto shutdown is worth the bother and would it really be so bad if the PC just died when the battery ran out?
That UPS has been running for many years since, with no supporting software, and no hint of a problem. It self-tests every now and then, and tells me when the battery needs replacing.
If the PC is in the process of updating its disk(s) at the time of an abrupt shut down, the disk(s) data structures could be left in an inconsistent state, resulting in data loss or even making the disk unusable. An orderly shut down allows the OS time to close files and tidy up.
NUT seems to support almost every UPS under the sun... It's also a client/server system so you have the UPS connected to one PC running NUT that monitors the UPS and provides a client interface to the LAN. You can then have more PCs running clients that will also auto shutdown depending on the UPS state. Of course these other clients also have to have their mains via the UPS and be on the LAN.
I suspect most software supplied with a UPS is just for one PC directly connected to the UPS.
Personally I'd shy away from APC as they have a reputation of cooking batteries, 3 to 4 years life at best. By the time they fail the battery cases will be swollen, some times to the extent that you would have to cut the metal work away to get them out.
Wouldn't touch the windows-only malware supplied with most things like this. I find that the open source apcupsd does the job pretty well on windows and Linux (but check compatibility with newer models).
I suppose that depends on why you're using a UPS. If it's to let you ride out short interruptions while actually using the machine then auto-shutdown is pretty pointless - if the power goes off just finish whay you're doing and shut down manually. For servers or unattended systems it's preferable to have an ordelry shutdown before the battery runs flat.
In theory, yes. In practice...? NTFS is actually pretty robust in such circumstances. As it happens my PC has a rather flaky power connector and I've lost count of the number of times I've accidentally switched it off with no apparent ill-effects. That's not to say it can't happen, of course, but based on past experience I wouldn't expect any problem.
And this is why I want the UPS - my 'main' system sits unattended in my office which is detached from the house, and I use it via remote sessions from a laptop or other desk top from where ever I happen to be. It handles my emails via Outlook, which downloads them every 3 mins 24/7 from BT. It is the outlook data file that is at risk of corruption in power cuts. Not worried about continuing working during power loss on this PC, just an orderly shut down.
It's a long time since I tried it, but I found their supplied software resulted in more system downtime than the unreliable mains supply we had in the office had caused before buying a UPS.
With Solaris, it was all much more reliable just to let the battery run dead and cut the power to the system without warning. The UPS would tied over power cuts up to 10 mins which was 99% of them, and the OS (even before journeling filesystems) would be sufficiently idle 10 mins after a power cut that it never had any problems with corrupted filesystem. I did use the software to save the logs from the UPS, but not to shutdown the system.
It's not the underlying file system, more the apps that run on it.
An Outlook PST file can happily get itself corrupted in normal use. Let alone when a crash meant the program didn't get a chance to finish updating it.
Ever since win2k, windows OSen show, in their services and apps list, a microsoft service called "Uninterruptible Power Supply". This refers to an executable (C:\WINNT\System32\ups.exe) in the case of win2k which, afaiaa, is a standard windows component.
I've currently got it disabled since I've never connected a UPS interface to this win2k box (or to any other PC for that matter - the one box that would benefit, the N4F box, is protected by a BackUPS500 which has no such interface).
I can only presume that this service would monitor a serial or USB interface (possibly even the ethernet interface) but have never had any reason to delve into the 'Nuts and Bolts' of this service feature.
A quick look in the Help for win2k suggests that it expects the signalling to be over a serial port which will allow windows Plug 'n' Play to detect the UPS's capabilities and requirements so that only valid signalling options are shown when configuring the UPS service.
I can only assume that winXP and above will cater for USB as well as serial ports (and possibly internet ports) with later OSes offering even greater OOTB support for a wider range of UPSes.
It might be worth a search of the Help feature for UPS related questions. I dare say the USP supplied software may simply provide a 'driver' which could, for example, allow a win2k box to monitor the UPS via a USB port or even an ethernet one.
My UPS is an APC Smart-UPS 1000, bought more than ten years ago after a series of rural failures and brown-outs killed my PC of the day. I reckon it cost me 500 quid to replace everything, at least. It was sold as serial port monitoring, so that's what I did, for a few years, then one day noticed it actually had a nearly-hidden USB port on the back of it. Hooked that up and it chatted to the PC fine on it. Anwyay, to answer your question, the remote lead is useful for configuring a timelimit and a graceful shutdown when a (customer) pre-set time is reached. Around here, if the power isn't back on in ten minutes, it's likely to be off for a good bit longer (and the vast majority of outages are seconds only). I set it to auto/graceful shut down at 12 minutes or so and it's worked fine.
By the way - ignore/disable the APC routing of testing the batteries every fortnight - that will kill them far quicker than they need to be. I doctored that from an early stage and my batteries only went t*ts-up after a decade of use. Much, much later than the typical three or four years most others reported they got. Ritek batteries from ups-trader on ebay are the best bang for the buck.The bloke running that is a former denizen of here and other comp-related groups.
Grimly thanks for that - very useful. As it happens I have an APC Smart-UPS
750 arriving by courier today :)
When you connected the USB port did the operating system (Which operating system?) just recognise it and allow battery monitoring? Or did you have to load 'Powerchute' ?
Via USB, XP used its on-board battery monitor which gave useful enough display of basic state. I had (then didn't bother with) Powerchute for a while. I have a couple versions of Powerchute, handy enough, I suppose, but Powerchute on its own will want to kill the batteries by default, so that needs to be over-ridden. Powerchute is useful for setting graceful shutdown times, and monitoring mains fluctuations, but that's about it, really.
When you plug in the USB cable Windows should recognise the UPS and then treat the system, from a power perspective, as a laptop. You'll get a battery symbol with a %age meter, and the option to provide an alarm and hibernate at some preset power level.
Batteries can last a long while, but can be difficult to determine its end of life.
I acquired a UPS when an office shut down. I spent a good few hours configuring NUT to work with it. The problems started with getting the system to realise the USB was secretly pretending to be a serial port, and when on from there.
I'm sure in reality, it's no more complex than Windows. But the fragmented nature of Linux documentation can make things tricky.
That said, now it's setup, it works fine. I've got an old mobile phone connected to the server via BT, and when a power event trips, I get sent an SMS. If the power is out for more than 10 minutes, the server shuts down.
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