J.A. de Vries wrote:
Hi, Due to power outages at my home I want to buy an UPS for my SOHO server. For my needs something between 700 and 1000VA should be enough. I'd like to have auto shutdown and powerup and some monitoring facilities too. After some Googling I am thinking of buying either an APC Smart-UPS 750 or a MGE Evolution 850. As far as I know APC is the "big brand" and it certainly is the one that is the easiest to get around here. TheirPowerchute software seems to support Linux as well.
By all means go with APC.Their Powerchute software is cr*p because it only runs on M$ OS, but the Linux support is superb, mainly because of one guy: Adam Kropelin who maintains the apcupsd package.
That said, Debian is hanging back here, because they have both Etch and Sid to version 3.12.4 while the available version is already on 3.13.12.
The home site is: http://www.apcupsd.com/ They have a very active mailing list.What I would do if I were you is subscribe to the mailing list and ask about the APC Smart-UPS 750 and *then* buy.
I have an Back-UPS LS 500 and have apcupsd 3.13.2 (22 February 2006) installed from upstream.
I wrote some monitoring applets that give me on the second info as to the status of the UPS:
http://www.geocities.com/hugovanwoerkom/d_tstime.jpegThe first parameter shown is 'TIME_LEFT', the minutes that the system would run on battery if the power would be cut (which happens often here). That variable varies with what the CPU is doing at the moment.
The main problem with APC is where to get their batteries. A battery last about 3 years.
HTH Hugo