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 SUNOS
safenet
SAFENET(8) NUT Manual SAFENET(8)
NAME
safenet - Driver for SafeNet compatible UPS equipment
NOTE
This man page only documents the hardware-specific features of the safenet driver. For information about the core driver, see nutupsdrv(8).
SUPPORTED HARDWARE
This driver supports UPS equipment which can be controlled via SafeNet v1.0 for Windows (serial interface only).
EXTRA ARGUMENTS
This driver supports the following optional settings in the ups.conf(5) file:
manufacturer=value
Autodetection of this parameter is not possible yet (and it probably never will be). Therefore, this user-defined string accepts any
name. The default is unknown.
modelname=value
Like manufacturer above. The default is unknown.
serialnumber=value
Like manufacturer above. The default is unknown.
ondelay=value
Time to wait before switching on the UPS (minutes). Defaults to 1 minute.
offdelay=value
Time to wait before shutting down the UPS (seconds). Defaults to 30 seconds.
UPSCMD
This driver supports some instant commands (see upscmd(8)):
test.battery.start
Start UPS self test
test.battery.stop
Cancel UPS self test
test.failure.start
Start simulated power failure
test.failure.stop
Cancel simulated power failure
beeper.enable
Enable the UPS beeper
beeper.mute
Temporarily mute the UPS beeper
beeper.toggle
Toggle the UPS beeper
shutdown.return
Turn off the load and wait for the power to return. Uses the timer defined by offdelay.
shutdown.reboot
Turn off the load and return. Uses the timers defined by offdelay and ondelay.
KNOWN PROBLEMS
If you run the shutdown.return command with mains present, the output may stay on or switch off and not back on again. The shutdown.reboot
command will unconditionally switch on the load again (with or without mains present).
If the driver is called with the -k option (or through upsdrvctl shutdown) it tries to detect which command should be used in an attempt to
stay off until mains is present again or to cycle the output if the power returned in the mean time. This isn't bullet-proof, and you
should be prepared that the power will either not be shutdown, or that it doesn't return when the power comes back.
AUTHOR
Arjen de Korte <adkorte-guest at alioth.debian.org>
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 SAFENET(8)