Topic: UPS suggestions-automatic shutdown/restart

[Tony Otley]

I am looking to get an UPS to protect the SME 5.12 server in our small office in case of power cuts. Some of them(Belkin and others) claim to have Linux software for auto shutdown when battery backup is getting low via a serial port connection.Anybody got this working? Would ideally like it it boot up again without intervention when power is restored if the power goes down when I am not around.
Any recommended units. 300-500KVA. Not too expensive. Does the kernel support these power down functions?
Tony

[tibor]

We are using APC BackUPS 500VA with a serial port connection. As a monitoring SW we followed a how-to on http://myezserver.com/downloads/mitel/contrib/apcupsd-3.8.2/

Works great.

[Ray Mitchell]

Have a look at powstatd. There is a HOWTO on how to set it up on th e-smith.org site. It works OK for me with a small APC UPS, and is designed to fit in with the sme server design concepts. It will power down and up automatically and also shutdown the UPS when power fails. Your UPS size will be determined by how much run time you want when power has failed. If you just want to gracefully shutdown after 5 minutes or so as small UPS will do eg 300VA should give nearly an hour without a monitor connected. Make sure you allow for when the batteries become old and don't have full capacity anymore, (eg 1hr when new = 3 minutes when old). You will need to adjust the time settings to suit your requirements in a custom template. The default is set for 2 minutes.
Regards
Ray Mitchell

[Ray Mitchell]

PS You will need to set your PC's BIOS to boot up when AC power returns to achieve unattended automatic power up of your system. Also don't set the time before shutdown occurs to be too long, to allow some power to be left in the batteries in case of of multiple power failures immediately one after each other.
Regards
Ray Mitchell.

[Tony Otley]

Thanks for the feedback. Will look at look at getting an APC model. Seem quite reasonable price.
Any idea if I could also use it to shut down my Gateway/router which is running Smoothwall 0.99 linux to auto dial and share the ISDN internet connection. Server and gateway are both low power and running without keyboards and monitors so a 500 or 625VA unit should run both fine. The Smoothwall distro is a stripped down version based on Debian (I think).Can that get a shutdown command from the UPS as well or from the SME server. You only get one serial connection from the UPS I presume so only directly signal one box. I don't know much about SNMP or if the Smoothwall distro has the required components being a bare bones affair.
Tony

[Ray Mitchell]

Tony
I don't know how to do it BUT I saw reference in the powstatd support  documents about running a daemon that could shut down multiple machines. It would appear to be possible. The powstad man page would be useful reading and may help you to work out how to implement what you are after. Ther is alos a HOWTO by Graeme Robinson on using powstatd. I don't think that the APC UPS software will give you the same versatility, but not 100% sure on that.
Ray Mitchell

[ClaudioG]

Hi,

i) Look "HowTo implement APC UPS monitoring" by Darrel May: works fine for me and have a link to APCUPSD User Manual that explain how to use with multiple server.

ii) A little question: why you use sme + smoothwall? If the reason is only (as you write) to share dialup ISDN, IMHO is simpler to use a ISDN hardware router (I use Zyxel Prestige)

Regards,
ClaudioG

[Tony Otley]

Thanks for the replies. Checked out "HowTo implement APC UPS monitoring" by Darrel May and got some good hints. Looks like the only problem may be getting the different istros to communicate has they use different ports and the debian versions available are different to the Red Hat versions used by SME.
The smoothwall box is a good firewall and seperating the firewall and server functions gives us more flexibility if we get a better dedicated connection later. Currently ISDN is our only higher speed fast response option. Also the smoothwall box was a redundant P133 so cost practically nothing to set up. I work for a cash strapped charity and the IT budget is very small.
Tony