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Uninterruptible Power Supplies
Posted at August 18, 2008 12:11 pm | In Technology | By Ben Woodruff
Lately we’ve been having a ton of power outages in the greater Rochester area, which is very frustrating for someone like me who lives their life in front of electronics.
I decided it was time to buy some UPSs (Uninteruprible Power Supplies). THE brand name for UPS equipment is APC. In fact it’s so popular it’s become one of those “diluted” brands like Kleenex. “APC” has come to mean any brand UPS much the same as “Kleenex” has come to mean any brand tissue.
So I decided to purchase two UPSs. One for my room, and one for our den (where my server and networking equipment is). I got an APC BackUPS 1500 for the den and an APC BackUPS 1300 for my room. They have handy LCD displays that can give you information like usage, # of power “events” (outages), etc. For the most part, so far, I’ve been happy with them. I wanted to have a large overhead, so neither is under more than 50% load (although the 1500 is close, especially right when everything is turning on).
My biggest disappointment is that these units can certainly power more than one computer, but they can only interface with one computer to tell it to shutdown properly when the battery is about to die. In order to shutdown more than one computer you need to connect the UPS to your local network through an additional Network Management Card (an extra $300) which isn’t even available for the BackUPS models. You need to have SmartUPSs.
This isn’t a huge deal at home because I only power three computers in total with them, but is for one of the businesses I work with who also uses APC units. They currently power 8 servers off of 3 APCs. Luckily they have the SmartUPS models, so we at least had the option of getting them the network management cards. We were pretty sure they weren’t going to spend $900 on UPS upgrades though. I looked on eBay and found 3 of the cards that should work for ~$200 total. Not a bad deal, if they work. Still waiting on them to ship here.
If that still doesn’t work, I think I may have a work around.
This post on voipfreak.ca explains how to remotely shutdown a Linux machine from Windows (so that covers our 1 Linux box), and Windows has a way to shutdown remote Windows machines using the shutdown command. So what I’m thinking I can do is put together a batch script that tells all of the machines the APC data cables are not plugged into to shutdown. The built-in Windows UPS utility has the ability to specify a script to run when the machine is being told to shutdown by a UPS.
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I’m surprised there isn’t a program that will shutdown other computers for you.
Comment by Jordan — August 18, 2008 @ 9:18 pm
Send the cards back, I can save you $200. I’ve already done this for my Windows servers and I’m about to implement the VoipPhreak.ca Linux shutdown script.
I don’t have time to show you the Windows script at the moment, but if you’ll email me (CBdeVidal (AT) GMail (DOT) com) I’ll get it to you. Basically I had to create three scripts to use with the APC software.
Comment by Chris de Vidal — August 20, 2008 @ 8:52 pm
Hi Chris,
Do you do anything different than I suggested (using the Windows shutdown command)?
We felt that even though that would work, it wasn’t the best solution. For $200 everyone’ll be happy. We got the cards today, I’ll be checking them out tomorrow to make sure they work as advertised.
Comment by Ben Woodruff — August 20, 2008 @ 8:56 pm