Having hopefully sorted out my power failure protected timer issue as per a
series of previous posts I'm now turning my attention to protecting my
desktop PCs that run Windows 7 Professional.

Is it a major task to get the PC to monitor the UPS battery and shut down
when the level is critical? I will almost certainly go with a major brand
such as APC (unless advised to the contrary) and I believe most of their
offerings have a USB port for this purpose.

Has anyone first hand experience of doing this? Are there any gotcha's ?

Andrew

Andrew Mawson wrote:
Having hopefully sorted out my power failure protected timer issue as per a
series of previous posts I'm now turning my attention to protecting my
desktop PCs that run Windows 7 Professional.

Is it a major task to get the PC to monitor the UPS battery and shut down
when the level is critical? I will almost certainly go with a major brand
such as APC (unless advised to the contrary) and I believe most of their
offerings have a USB port for this purpose.

Has anyone first hand experience of doing this? Are there any gotcha's ?

I've have an APC UPS for many years and I initially used their software.
However the software they supplied was defective in that it included a
short-dated security certificate. The first I knew was when my internet
access suddenly started behaving oddly for no apparent reason. It took
me several days concentrated work (restoring my system one application
at a time) to discover the cause of the problem, and although APC
admitted what had happened, they didn't seem particularly bothered about
the disruption they'd caused their customers.

So I removed the APC software and resolved to avoid that brand in
future. The incident made me wonder whether that auto shutdown is worth
the bother and would it really be so bad if the PC just died when the
battery ran out?

That UPS has been running for many years since, with no supporting
software, and no hint of a problem. It self-tests every now and then,
and tells me when the battery needs replacing.

--
Mike Barnes
Cheshire, England

On 12/08/2014 10:48, Mike Barnes wrote:
The incident made me wonder whether that auto shutdown is worth the
bother and would it really be so bad if the PC just died when the
battery ran out?
If the PC is in the process of updating its disk(s) at the time of an
abrupt shut down, the disk(s) data structures could be left in an
inconsistent state, resulting in data loss or even making the disk
unusable. An orderly shut down allows the OS time to close files and
tidy up.

On Tue, 12 Aug 2014 09:53:35 +0000 (UTC), Jethro_uk wrote:

It's when you go off-grid (e.g. Linux) that you can have real problems.

NUT seems to support almost every UPS under the sun... It's also a
client/server system so you have the UPS connected to one PC running
NUT that monitors the UPS and provides a client interface to the LAN.
You can then have more PCs running clients that will also auto
shutdown depending on the UPS state. Of course these other clients
also have to have their mains via the UPS and be on the LAN.

I suspect most software supplied with a UPS is just for one PC
directly connected to the UPS.

Personally I'd shy away from APC as they have a reputation of cooking
batteries, 3 to 4 years life at best. By the time they fail the
battery cases will be swollen, some times to the extent that you
would have to cut the metal work away to get them out.

--
Cheers
Dave.

On 2014-08-12, Mike Barnes wrote:
I've have an APC UPS for many years and I initially used their software.
However the software they supplied was defective

Wouldn't touch the windows-only malware supplied with most things like this.
I find that the open source apcupsd http://www.apcupsd.org/ does the job
pretty well on windows and Linux (but check compatibility with newer models).

The incident made me wonder whether that auto shutdown is worth
the bother and would it really be so bad if the PC just died when the
battery ran out?

I suppose that depends on why you're using a UPS. If it's to let you ride
out short interruptions while actually using the machine then auto-shutdown
is pretty pointless - if the power goes off just finish whay you're doing
and shut down manually. For servers or unattended systems it's preferable
to have an ordelry shutdown before the battery runs flat.

--
Ian

"Tamahome!!!" - "Miaka!!!"

nemo wrote:
On 12/08/2014 10:48, Mike Barnes wrote:
The incident made me wonder whether that auto shutdown is worth the
bother and would it really be so bad if the PC just died when the
battery ran out?
If the PC is in the process of updating its disk(s) at the time of an
abrupt shut down, the disk(s) data structures could be left in an
inconsistent state, resulting in data loss or even making the disk
unusable. An orderly shut down allows the OS time to close files and
tidy up.

In theory, yes. In practice...? NTFS is actually pretty robust in such
circumstances. As it happens my PC has a rather flaky power connector
and I've lost count of the number of times I've accidentally switched it
off with no apparent ill-effects. That's not to say it can't happen, of
course, but based on past experience I wouldn't expect any problem.

--
Mike Barnes
Cheshire, England

"Ian" wrote in message
...

For servers or unattended systems it's preferable
to have an ordelry shutdown before the battery runs flat.


And this is why I want the UPS - my 'main' system sits unattended in my
office which is detached from the house, and I use it via remote sessions
from a laptop or other desk top from where ever I happen to be. It handles
my emails via Outlook, which downloads them every 3 mins 24/7 from BT. It is
the outlook data file that is at risk of corruption in power cuts. Not
worried about continuing working during power loss on this PC, just an
orderly shut down.

Andrew

In article ,
"Andrew Mawson" writes:
Having hopefully sorted out my power failure protected timer issue as per a
series of previous posts I'm now turning my attention to protecting my
desktop PCs that run Windows 7 Professional.

Is it a major task to get the PC to monitor the UPS battery and shut down
when the level is critical? I will almost certainly go with a major brand
such as APC (unless advised to the contrary) and I believe most of their
offerings have a USB port for this purpose.

Has anyone first hand experience of doing this? Are there any gotcha's ?

It's a long time since I tried it, but I found their supplied software
resulted in more system downtime than the unreliable mains supply we had
in the office had caused before buying a UPS.

With Solaris, it was all much more reliable just to let the battery run
dead and cut the power to the system without warning. The UPS would tied
over power cuts up to 10 mins which was 99% of them, and the OS (even
before journeling filesystems) would be sufficiently idle 10 mins after
a power cut that it never had any problems with corrupted filesystem.
I did use the software to save the logs from the UPS, but not to
shutdown the system.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

On Tue, 12 Aug 2014 10:18:36 +0100, "Andrew Mawson"
wrote:

Having hopefully sorted out my power failure protected timer issue as per a
series of previous posts I'm now turning my attention to protecting my
desktop PCs that run Windows 7 Professional.

Is it a major task to get the PC to monitor the UPS battery and shut down
when the level is critical? I will almost certainly go with a major brand
such as APC (unless advised to the contrary) and I believe most of their
offerings have a USB port for this purpose.

Has anyone first hand experience of doing this? Are there any gotcha's ?

Andrew

Ever since win2k, windows OSen show, in their services and apps list,
a microsoft service called "Uninterruptible Power Supply". This refers
to an executable (C:\WINNT\System32\ups.exe) in the case of win2k
which, afaiaa, is a standard windows component.

I've currently got it disabled since I've never connected a UPS
interface to this win2k box (or to any other PC for that matter - the
one box that would benefit, the N4F box, is protected by a BackUPS500
which has no such interface).

I can only presume that this service would monitor a serial or USB
interface (possibly even the ethernet interface) but have never had
any reason to delve into the 'Nuts and Bolts' of this service feature.

A quick look in the Help for win2k suggests that it expects the
signalling to be over a serial port which will allow windows Plug 'n'
Play to detect the UPS's capabilities and requirements so that only
valid signalling options are shown when configuring the UPS service.

I can only assume that winXP and above will cater for USB as well as
serial ports (and possibly internet ports) with later OSes offering
even greater OOTB support for a wider range of UPSes.

It might be worth a search of the Help feature for UPS related
questions. I dare say the USP supplied software may simply provide a
'driver' which could, for example, allow a win2k box to monitor the
UPS via a USB port or even an ethernet one.
--
J B Good

On Tue, 12 Aug 2014 10:18:36 +0100, "Andrew Mawson"
wrote:

Is it a major task to get the PC to monitor the UPS battery and shut down
when the level is critical? I will almost certainly go with a major brand
such as APC (unless advised to the contrary) and I believe most of their
offerings have a USB port for this purpose.

Has anyone first hand experience of doing this? Are there any gotcha's ?

My UPS is an APC Smart-UPS 1000, bought more than ten years ago after
a series of rural failures and brown-outs killed my PC of the day. I
reckon it cost me 500 quid to replace everything, at least.
It was sold as serial port monitoring, so that's what I did, for a few
years, then one day noticed it actually had a nearly-hidden USB port
on the back of it. Hooked that up and it chatted to the PC fine on it.
Anwyay, to answer your question, the remote lead is useful for
configuring a timelimit and a graceful shutdown when a (customer)
pre-set time is reached. Around here, if the power isn't back on in
ten minutes, it's likely to be off for a good bit longer (and the vast
majority of outages are seconds only). I set it to auto/graceful shut
down at 12 minutes or so and it's worked fine.

By the way - ignore/disable the APC routing of testing the batteries
every fortnight - that will kill them far quicker than they need to
be. I doctored that from an early stage and my batteries only went
tits-up after a decade of use. Much, much later than the typical three
or four years most others reported they got.
Ritek batteries from ups-trader on ebay are the best bang for the
buck.The bloke running that is a former denizen of here and other
comp-related groups.

"Grimly Curmudgeon" wrote in message
...

On Tue, 12 Aug 2014 10:18:36 +0100, "Andrew Mawson"
wrote:

Is it a major task to get the PC to monitor the UPS battery and shut down
when the level is critical? I will almost certainly go with a major brand
such as APC (unless advised to the contrary) and I believe most of their
offerings have a USB port for this purpose.

Has anyone first hand experience of doing this? Are there any gotcha's ?

My UPS is an APC Smart-UPS 1000, bought more than ten years ago after
a series of rural failures and brown-outs killed my PC of the day. I
reckon it cost me 500 quid to replace everything, at least.
It was sold as serial port monitoring, so that's what I did, for a few
years, then one day noticed it actually had a nearly-hidden USB port
on the back of it. Hooked that up and it chatted to the PC fine on it.
Anwyay, to answer your question, the remote lead is useful for
configuring a timelimit and a graceful shutdown when a (customer)
pre-set time is reached. Around here, if the power isn't back on in
ten minutes, it's likely to be off for a good bit longer (and the vast
majority of outages are seconds only). I set it to auto/graceful shut
down at 12 minutes or so and it's worked fine.

By the way - ignore/disable the APC routing of testing the batteries
every fortnight - that will kill them far quicker than they need to
be. I doctored that from an early stage and my batteries only went
tits-up after a decade of use. Much, much later than the typical three
or four years most others reported they got.
Ritek batteries from ups-trader on ebay are the best bang for the
buck.The bloke running that is a former denizen of here and other
comp-related groups.

Grimly thanks for that - very useful. As it happens I have an APC Smart-UPS
750 arriving by courier today

When you connected the USB port did the operating system (Which operating
system?) just recognise it and allow battery monitoring? Or did you have to
load 'Powerchute' ?

Andrew

Grimly Curmudgeon wrote:

Ritek batteries from ups-trader on ebay are the best bang for the
buck.The bloke running that is a former denizen of here

Ritar.

On 12/08/14 10:53, Jethro_uk wrote:

Most UPS come with software to manage them - should be a doddle for
windows. Check out "WinPower"

It's when you go off-grid (e.g. Linux) that you can have real problems.

Not so. I've been using apcupsd on my servers for ten years at least
without a hiccup.

On Fri, 15 Aug 2014 08:28:12 +0100, "Andrew Mawson"
wrote:

When you connected the USB port did the operating system (Which operating
system?) just recognise it and allow battery monitoring? Or did you have to
load 'Powerchute' ?

Via USB, XP used its on-board battery monitor which gave useful enough
display of basic state. I had (then didn't bother with) Powerchute for
a while. I have a couple versions of Powerchute, handy enough, I
suppose, but Powerchute on its own will want to kill the batteries by
default, so that needs to be over-ridden.
Powerchute is useful for setting graceful shutdown times, and
monitoring mains fluctuations, but that's about it, really.

On 15/08/2014 09:51, Grimly Curmudgeon wrote:
On Fri, 15 Aug 2014 08:28:12 +0100, "Andrew Mawson"
wrote:

When you connected the USB port did the operating system (Which operating
system?) just recognise it and allow battery monitoring? Or did you have to
load 'Powerchute' ?

Via USB, XP used its on-board battery monitor which gave useful enough
display of basic state. I had (then didn't bother with) Powerchute for
a while. I have a couple versions of Powerchute, handy enough, I
suppose, but Powerchute on its own will want to kill the batteries by
default, so that needs to be over-ridden.
Powerchute is useful for setting graceful shutdown times, and
monitoring mains fluctuations, but that's about it, really.

I also use a UPS with Windows 7.

When you plug in the USB cable Windows should recognise the UPS and then
treat the system, from a power perspective, as a laptop. You'll get a
battery symbol with a %age meter, and the option to provide an alarm and
hibernate at some preset power level.

Batteries can last a long while, but can be difficult to determine its
end of life.

On 12/08/2014 11:31, Ian wrote:
On 2014-08-12, Mike Barnes wrote:
I've have an APC UPS for many years and I initially used their software.
However the software they supplied was defective

Wouldn't touch the windows-only malware supplied with most things like this.
I find that the open source apcupsd http://www.apcupsd.org/ does the job
pretty well on windows and Linux (but check compatibility with newer models).

Thank you for the link. Very useful information, especially the manual!