Topic: powstatd vs apcupsd

[Toby Kerrison]

Is anyone able to tell me any of the advantages of one of these in relation to the other.

[Ray Mitchell]

Dear Toby

I'm sure there are many differences, which may or may not be significant to you.
Here are a few:
apcupsd is for apc brand ups's
powstatd is configurable for any UPS with serial connection
depending on the capabilities of the UPS, both will shutdown your server and ups and kill (turn off) the ups (good for prolonged power outages)
apcupsd sends a nice email message when power is lost and power returns
apcupsd gives nice graphs of whats going on with your (smart) ups
apcupsd can be configured to control network workstations as well as the server
powstatd has many other configurable options but in order to utilise these you may need to recompile the program, see "man powstad"
apcupsd has been integrated into sme server manager
powstatd needs a little bit of command line entry to set it up, quite easy though
powstatd can be configured for any brand or model of ups (with serial port) by running it in test mode and determining what signals are being sent to/from the ups

I'm sure there are a few more but they are the basics.
Final answer, depends on your ups brand and depends on what features you need

Hope this helps
Regards
Ray Mitchell

[Nick]

Just another note, one of the developers/maintainers of apcupsd, Kern Sibbald is probably one of the nicest guys I've had the pleasure to interact with, he is extremely helpful, and patient. If you have questions, his list (which he answers almost all the questions) is a great resource.

Just my experience, for me, it's people like him that make Open Source software such a pleasure to use.

If you have an apc ups you can't go wrong with apcupsd.

[toby]

Thanks heaps.....

Sort of confirmed what I thought. We standardise on APC UPS devices so clearly apcupsd would be more preferable for us.....the e-mails etc seem similar to what we have on our Powerchute software

[Shad Lords]

Another option if you are running 5.6U2 is nut.  It does everything that apcupsd does but also supports many other ups including USB models.  This is one of the packages that gets installed with Update 2.

The big advantage of nut comes in when you want to monitor/control more than one UPS.  It does take a little configuring but not really any more than any of the other packages.

-Shad

[Michael Doerner]

Shad,

I would like to test nut. I could not fins any documentation around SME server for it. Can you point me start reading about it's required setup?

Regards,
Michael Doerner

[Paul]

Shad,

I have noticed you mentioning NUT in several post on this forum.  

In one post you state some problems that need to be addressed.  Have these problems been resolved?

You also mention that you are working on a How-To, are you having any luck with the how-to?

In an earlier post I offered the use of a test server and 3 ups's for testing the USB implementation.  My offer to help is still open, please let me know what I can do to help on this as there seems to be a lot of interest in USB UPSes.

Thanks,
Paul