Not to hijack this thread, but my preferred retailer has started stocking Eaton UPSes. Eaton is a very large commercial electrical supplier, they ought to know what they're doing. Also I seem to recall they cooperate very well with the NUT developers (the same can't be said for APC).
As someone that worked in electrical generation, I've learned that the larger commercial electrical companies are just as screwed up, money hungry, and quick to earn a buck at the behest of their customers as anyone else. I'm not saying Eaton is bad or anything, just that I don't think it's a good idea to judge them by size. ;)
I have no idea if they worked with NUT developers or not. I'd assume that if they did then they'd have a vast majority of the UPS market and this would be something that is well known, not because of the work they did, but because of the wide net they cast with perspective buyers looking for NUT-compatible UPSes.
BTW two more knocks against APC: it reports virtually no data to NUT, just enough to report that it's online or on battery and not much else. There's also anecdotal evidence on another forum that APC UPSes are very hard on batteries - overcharging them, overheating them and generally shortening their life.
Well, some APC UPSes do report virtually no data. Some report a crapload of data that has not been reverse engineered. It does depend on the model. I learned a lot about APC UPSes when I was setting up nut manually on a linux box 3 years ago and I had 3 different UPSes that I
could use.
I'm not sure I buy the "very hard on batteries" story. Everyone fears for that kind of problem. I've never had a battery last less than 5 years, I've never had a battery overheat, and I've never replaced a battery that was swollen, misshapen, or had signs of any kind of overcharging. I could make the same anecdotal evidence that Seagate hard drives fail more frequently because they've tuned their firmware for performance instead of reliability. Proving Seagate does that is just as difficult as proving that APC is hard on the batteries. Unless someone is going to hook up a bunch of oscilloscopes, log UPS usage over time, along with time current, etc then it's just someone's opinion. I've owned about 90% APCs (currently own 5 of them) and they've all worked great except for one. One had a bad post on the battery so the UPS would touch the battery terminal and it would show as good, but if you did a battery test or put it under load (anything that required a good connection from the battery to the UPS itself for current flow) then the test would fail or the battery would lose power.
So yeah, calling it fake. But, that's just my opinion versus everyone else's. And we know opinions are like a$$holes...