08.08.05
The saga of the new UPS
Well, my wife was getting upset that the UPS on her computer didn’t last quite as long as the UPS on my computer when the power went out (not an uncommon occurrance at our house) as I had the firewall and a bunch of other stuff plugged into hers, so I made the trip to Best Buy and got myself a fancy APC BackUPS RS 1500 with the cute USB connection so I could monitor it. After spending the better part of 2 hours crawling around under the desk rewiring everything so my wife’s machines had the old UPSes to themselves, which should give them a decent amount of battery life, I came to the dilemma of where to monitor and control my new UPS from.
Initially I went with the easy option of using the supplied PowerChute Personal software on my XP box. It installed and ran with no problems but was unfortunately rather primitive in operation as I rather suspected it would be (the “Personal” tag gives it away). I really wanted to be able to monitor the power through historical logs and not just have some fancy UI telling me what the lights on the UPS tell me all by themselves, so I went to APC’s site and found “PowerChute Business”. Downloading and installing the 3 components (driver, server, console) on my desktop turned out to be a large waste of time as nothing I could do would convince the driver to connect to the UPS. Apparently, at least according to what I could glean from the FAQs on APC’s site the driver is quite picky about having the UPS connected to a root USB hub and the only thing I could think was that this was somehow preventing it from picking up my UPS.
Giving up on APC’s software I started looking for something more sophisticated that I could tinker with and found apcupsd which I could emerge into my Gentoo installation. A quick kernel recompile to enable USBHID devices and a cable switch from my XP machine to the Linux machine had the Linux box pick up and start monitoring the USB. An hour or so of tinkering with scripts had me all ready to ignore transient faults and let the Linux box shut down my XP machine remotely when the battery was low.
At this point, my wife wanted to watch some SG-1 episodes and I wasn’t disagreeing (I’m really enjoying that show at the moment – it’s no Babylon 5, but it’s better than Star Trek). A few hours later I wandered back into the computer room to check up on the UPS and noticed it was kicking in over transient faults every 10–15 minutes. I knew the power was bad but really didn’t think it was THAT bad. For lack of anything better to do I finished up Demonstone when my wife went to bed (that is a fun diversion, but way too short) and noticed the UPS clicking in and out every 10–15 minutes as reported on the Linux box’s log. I was tired and went to bed.
Waking this morning I switched the UPS back to PowerChute Personal on my XP box as it had better control over the UPS sensitivity but (as expected) the UPS continued to switch in and out. I guess the power where I am is just very crappy. It’s still on at the moment but I think I’ll have a play with NUT when I get home to see if it offers anything apcupsd didn’t.