01-24-2011
UPS are nearly always essential - even small ones can make the difference between a system shutting down gracefully and just turning off (Ive found in the past that if you calculate the downtime of the system and the cost of re-installing, including your own time spent doing that, then you tend to justify UPS on nearly all equipment)
Transactional filesystems can improve things when hardware has an abrupt power failure, but you cant rely on that fact. Also I have found that often network equipment is forgotten when spec'ing up UPS - services such as DNS, network shared filesystems and the like can often stop systems shutting down in a timely manner if the network has just been turned off. Make sure that systems with databases have large UPS as they can take a while to sync their disks and stop. I found that Active Directories and Windows Exchange Servers can take ages and ages to stop - so can need long running UPS. With machines which host virtual machines, often you can get the virtual machine to "suspend" instead of shutting down - this can make overall shutdown of the host system quicker. My last tip is to get the UPS to check their batteries regularly - ive too often found that UPS have batteries that have degraded to the point that they are useless.
I generally feel that if I am at the point of restoring a system image, then I have failed in my emergency measures, so although that is obviously the most important backup measure, I would try to make sure you never have to use it.
I hope some of these points help in your UPS decisions...
This User Gave Thanks to citaylor For This Post:
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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN
optiups
OPTIUPS(8) NUT Manual OPTIUPS(8)
NAME
optiups - Driver for Opti-UPS (Viewsonic) UPS and Zinto D (ONLINE-USV) equipment
NOTE
This man page only documents the hardware-specific features of the optiups driver. For information about the core driver, see nutupsdrv(8).
SUPPORTED HARDWARE
optiups was originally written against a PowerES 280es in nut-0.45. It was revised for nut-2.0.1 and tested against a PowerES 420E. It is
expected to work with at least the PowerES, PowerPS, and PowerVS models.
This driver additionally supports a Zinto D from ONLINE USV-Systeme AG because of their very similar commands, but it is unknown if it also
works with other UPS from them.
This driver will not work with the PowerES stock serial cable. You will need to construct your own three conductor cable:
UPS 6 -> PC 3
UPS 9 -> PC 2
UPS 4 -> PC 5
The cable for Online-USV uses pin UPS 7 (not UPS 4) -> PC 5.
EXTRA ARGUMENTS
This driver supports the following optional settings in the ups.conf(5) file:
status_only
Only poll for critical status information. Without this, optiups (and all NUT drivers) poll all sorts of information from the UPS
fairly often. It is probably not often enough to hurt anything, so this option probably is not very useful, unless you have a flaky
serial connection or a highly loaded machine.
nowarn_noimp
Does not print warnings when the UPS reports that a variable is not implemented or not pollable. Without the option you will get a
message sent to your system logs each time NUT polls the UPS. If you specify nowarn_noimp, this message will only be logged once.
fake_lowbatt
This forces the low battery flag true. Without it, if you want to test your UPS, you will have to unplug it and wait until the battery
drops to a low/critical voltage level before NUT will respond and power down your system. With the flag, NUT should power down the
system soon after you pull the plug. When you are done testing, you should remove this flag.
For basic shutdown configuration testing, the command upsmon -c fsd is preferred.
powerup
Zinto D from ONLINE-USV cannot be identified when switched to standby. Set this flag to allow the driver to power-up your Zinto UPS.
This will also power-up your equipment connected to the UPS!
BUGS
On the 420E, ups.serial and ups.temperature are unsupported features. This is not a bug in NUT or the NUT driver, just the way things are
with this UPS.
AUTHOR
Russell Kroll, Scott Heavner, Matthias Goebl
SEE ALSO
The core driver:
nutupsdrv(8)
Internet resources:
The NUT (Network UPS Tools) home page: http://www.networkupstools.org/
Network UPS Tools 05/21/2012 OPTIUPS(8)