Power Outage Notification

[rogerh]

I have personal hatred of setting up NUT. The first time I tried to set up NUT myself in a FreeBSD implementation it took almost 2 solid days of working on NUT exclusively to get the darn thing to work right how I wanted it.

I agree with you about NUT! There can't be many user programs that, as routinely distributed in for instance Centos, you have to write shell scripts to use them at all.

 

[jgreco]

Well, the 2 APC SMART-UPSes I have, once powered off will not power back on under any circumstances. You must physically touch them.

What model? As a longtime APC Smart-UPS owner/hater, that seems like an unfamiliar problem.

 

[Tywin]

Well, the 2 APC SMART-UPSes I have, once powered off will not power back on under any circumstances. You must physically touch them.

We use APC Smart-UPS 750, 1500, and 1500RT extensively throughout our lab, and I am pretty sure ours come up when power is restored. I'll give one a test on Monday.

 

[rogerh]

What model? As a longtime APC Smart-UPS owner/hater, that seems like an unfamiliar problem.

You can set quite a long turn-on delay. I suppose one might become impatient after five minutes or so and just flick the switch rather than wait. One of the values of turn-on delay, of course, is if the auto switch-off operates after line power has returned you don't want it to switch on again immediately, before the MB has lost standby power. But it may be a surprise if one is expecting it to come on straight away when power returns.

 

[jgreco]

We use APC Smart-UPS 750, 1500, and 1500RT extensively throughout our lab, and I am pretty sure ours come up when power is restored. I'll give one a test on Monday.

We've got a crapload of legacy Smart-UPS (~1990s) and some newer (SMT, SMX) ones. I am thinking that without a NMC you might actually need to chat with the UPS via the serial port to configure it to power the load back on. We have NMC's in everything. My recollection is that the UPS will power up but leave the load off until a certain battery percentage is attained, in order to guarantee some amount of runtime.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm not even sure what they were anymore. I'd have to check my friend's house since he adopted them. I'm sure they are SMART-UPS though, but I can't remember much more than that.

 

[rogerh]

Just as a matter of interest, while bug 4134 remains "not to be fixed", an apparent duplicate of it, bug 7675, has been fixed. So we will soon be able to shut off our UPSen with Freenas! As discussed above, this will create some new pitfalls people will have to be careful of, especially with a UPS which shuts itself off too quickly. Also, I strongly recommend carefully reading bug 5913 if you are going to use a timer to shutdown when on battery, or even if you sets such a timer in the GUI and then go back to shutdown on low battery, when you will find a permanent alteration to the shutdown delay has been created. Note bug 7991 seems to be a duplicate of 5913, but this one is also not to be fixed. It can, indeed, be worked round if you know about it. Just set a 5 second shutdown timer for "on battery", save it, and go back to shutdown on low battery and the excessive shutdown delay will have disappeared.