Re: hard crash despite UPS
On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 05:22:51PM -0800, nate wrote:
> Ross Boylan said:
> > My UPS, an APC BackUPS 650, seems ineffective under Linux. Originally I
> > thought this was because it could not cope with the load, but it works OK
> > under MS-Windows.
> >
> > That is, when I pull the cord from the wall under Windows I get an alert
> > the UPS is on battery. When I do the same under Linux, the
> > system powers off immediately (not a controlled shutdown).
>
>
> so are you saying that when the UPS switches to battery the system
> doesn't know and doesn't shut down? or are you saying that when you
> pull the plug the system immediately shuts off without warning?
>
It immediately shuts off without warning (thoug it does start
beeping). The UPS does not switch to battery; it just stops providing
electricity.
Thanks for the other tips. APC currently says Debian is not one of
their (semi)supported systems.
> I personally use NUT(Network UPS Tools) which is available in woody,
> has some nice features(though most of the nice ones aren't available
> on a BackUPS, only Pro and Smart among others).
>
The BackUPS provides almost no interesting information, so there isn't
much any software can do. It signals if the power has failed, though.
> does apcupsd have any way to verify communications? NUT has a upsc command
I'm not sure. It's not complaining. However, my tests (reported in a
second post) strongly suggest a communication problem is the cause of
all this. The UPS seems to shut off when it has trouble
communicating (that is, the power still flows through it, but it won't
switch to battery if the power fails).
> which can spit out information about the UPS connected(either networked
> or local). Maybe for some reason apcupsd is misconfigured, I've never
> used it myself.
>
The "LSR safety check engaged" messages suggest a low-level problem
with the serial driver and port configuration. How to fix it I don't know.
> Have you tried APC's powerchute? I'm not sure about their recent versions
> but have read one or 2 complaints in the past that they don't work on
> Debian. I keep an older version around which works fine on debian 2.2
> and 3.0 just incase I need to test. I put it here for now:
>
> http://portal.aphroland.org/pc452_glibc.tar.bz2
>
> it's a little clunky to install, but it does work, I wish NUT had some of
> the features powerchute did such as all the various notification options
> that Powerchute has, and being able to see the runtime in minutes.
>
> Sample NUT output:
> http://portal.aphroland.org/cgi-bin/nut/multimon.cgi
Nice. Too bad my UPS is so dumb--I don't think it gives out info like
% charge, load factor ...
>
> or, embedded in a webpage:
> http://portal.aphroland.org/
> (I hacked the script up quite a bit so it'd display HTML consistant with
> being embedded in another html page)
>
> or, as part of my home network monitoring setup:
> http://monitor.aphroland.org
>
> NUT also has the advantage of supporing many different kinds of UPSs
> (brands/models). Probably a dozen or more ..I like it mostly for the
> html status page, no need for a special client, or have to authenticate
> against something to view the UPS status, and can view multiple UPSs at
> the same time(at my former employer I monitored 10 SmartUPS units with
> NUT).
>
> nate
>
>
>
>
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