I think my new UPS sucks.
So I bought a UPS at Fry’s the other night (ironically, at the same time the power was going out at my house!) for the RAID box in the garage. None of the sub-$100 UPSes seemed to have official support for Linux from a software standpoint, and obviously that’s a big deal since I want it to shutdown cleanly in the case of power failure. I also wanted line conditioning, as the outlet I’m plugged into is right next to the washer and dryer, and although it’s likely a different circuit (haven’t tested this yet though), I’m sure when the dryer kicks on it could cause voltage fluctuation nearby.
So anyhow, it seems $70 was about the cheapest for line conditioning, and I didn’t want to spend much more, because I don’t care about lots of sustained wattage–after all, this is just a mostly-idly headless Athlon XP, and that’s it; I don’t want a giant UPS just to keep it running long enough to safely power down in the really rare occasion we have an outage (so far we’ve only had one in the 15 months we’ve lived in this unit.) I ended up buying the Belkin F6C550-AVR with USB connectivity. It’s got a nice form factor, reasonable power capacity, and votage conditioning. I figured, there’s gotta be a opensource driver/daemon for the monitoring of this baby, right? Certainly there must be standard protocols these things speak, if not straight ASCII… wrong.
It turns out, the UPS landscape is a fractitious, highly proprietary place. Basically NO company makes one with a simple serial ASCII protocol, it’s all binary (well, OK I can understand that), unpublished (for shame), and inconsistent. There are some projects for opensource support of monitoring various devices, the best of which seems to be NUT (Network UPS Tools), partially funded by one of the enterprise UPS players (short tutorial on NUT with Fedora here.) But the Belkin support is pretty slim, and it doesn’t look like the one I bought even has much monitorability beyond “hey, the power’s about to go out” and “my battery’s dead”. This just won’t do. I was about to pack it up and head back to Fry’s, but decided I really could use another UPS for the Tivo etc., anyhow, and I don’t care about the monitoring aspect for that (ok, also the box is kind of heavy and I didn’t want to go through Fry’s Return Line of Hell–in other words, the tactic works–they’ve helped convince me to keep it to avoid the hassle of the return process. Damn you, Fry’s!)
This time I’m going to be smarter about it and do more research up front, like I usually do. I just didn’t think UPSes would be (could be!) that big a deal to get support for. The NUT folks have a compatibility chart, so I think I’ll try to pick something from the intersection of that list and upcoming / current deals on Techbargains. Feh!