[mythtvnz] Possibly OT: UPS question [SOLVED]

[Barry Clearwater]

Not trying to be presumptuous but did your APC UPS need recalibrated?
There is (it seems) a little known procedure for recalibration when a new
battery replaces an old one, especially when the old ones run time has
dropped significantly.
IIRC, you need to cycle/run them on 3/4 load down to shutdown 3 times on a
new battery to reset them.  I used a 500W Halogen workshop lamp on one with
full charge.
First time it only lasted 5 minutes. Second time after charging much longer,
third time 29 minutes on the load. Or maybe forth time.
I found the procedure somewhere online some years ago so sorry for the lack
of reference.
YRMV, but I've found the ol' APC's sometimes have more life in them yet.
Random switching to battery shouldn't shut down the server straight away
unless the UPS is telling the software its less than 5% to go (and of course
you can set that)
I've always used apcupsd however.
And the dynalink ups's seem quite acceptable, so rejuvenating and old ups
might not be everyone's cup of tea.

Barry

On 14 January 2011 19:53, Robin Gilks <g8ecj at gilks.org> wrote:

>
> > Greetings all
> >
> > I've just replaced (or at least trying to!!) the  UPS on my backend. My
> > preference is to have all those disks let down carefully in the event of
> a
> > power failure:)
> >
> > I've got a Dynamix 1700 that uses a USB connection back to the PC. I've
> > tried NUT which always worked fine with my APC UPS but no go with this
> > one.
> >
> > I've also tried the included software as well but that wants to talk to a
> > serial port on the UPS - not a lot of good when its a USB port!!
>
> Well, if you bash your head against the wall for long enough you either
> get a headache or a solution - I got the latter!!
>
> The included software burst into life when I used the virtual device name
> of 'hid' which at least proved everything worked.
>
> I then hunted about until I found a patch for the blazer_usb NUT driver
> which seems to have solved pretty much all the problems except I can't
> read the remaining battery life from the UPS. The supplied software can so
> I guess I'll have to get a USB tracer installed and see what goes on.
>
> I haven't played with the NUT config for several years (my Gentoo servers
> tend to have a looooong lifetime) but I recall that it can do a shutdown
> after a set period of time. Provided the server shuts down before the UPS
> I'm happy!!
>
> To reiterate the story of the existing APC UPS - its on its way out and
> its NOT a battery problem. They used to last 2-3 years, now I'm lucky if I
> get 3 months and it does random switches to battery now as well (which of
> course shuts down the server). Its running at 50% load these days rather
> than the 60% load of back in the AMD Thunderbird CPU days so if anything
> it should be going better, not worse :(
>
> Cheers all for the feedback though...
>
>
> --
> Robin Gilks
>
>
>
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-- 

Barry Clearwater
Email: barryc at bcsystems.co.nz
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