[KLUG Members] Experience with UPS management, please?

[Robert G. Brown]

Folks,
  I'm looking at linking some UPS devices with various Linux
machines with several goals....

   1. Smooth shutdown: When there's an outage and the battery
      is getting really low, the system should be informed so it
      can go through an orderly shutdown procedure.

   2. Monitoring: We should be able to see some information about
      the UPS, such as charge state, perhaps power consumption
      stats, and so on.

   3. Script support: We should be able to write some scripts
      that inhibit premature system startup (requiring the UPS
      to reach a given charge level before allowing startup to
      proceed), and perform similar functions, and logging.

  I have a couple of types of UPS units to support, primarily some 
units from Powercom and APC. Most UPS units on sale now have a USB 
interface; these are somewhat older, with either RS-232 or custom 
cables that connect the UPS to a computer.

  Now, there are some proprietary software packages that support at 
least some of the above activity, and I may resort to them to solve 
some immediate problems. However, I am actually more interested in 
seeing how to use one of several F/OSS packages for this purpose, 
such as acpid, apmd, and so on.

   If you have experience with setting up and configuring UPS moni-
toring and control as I've described above (or more, of course), 
especially with freely available software, I would be most interested 
in reading what you have to say about this topic.

							Regards,
							---> RGB <---