[KLUG Members] Experience with UPS management, please?

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> You best check out the NUT project. www.networkupstools.org
> Avoid APCUPSD like the plague!

Any particular reason?  We have 15+ UPS scattered across three states
that I have to figure out a way to manage/monitor - all are APC with
either serial or ethernet connectivity.   I haven't begun this project
except some light reading,  and http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4347
is the best piece I've found so far.

One caveat is that THERE IS NO COMPUTER where some of these UPS's are
location,  but there are Cisco access servers (I can forward and reverse
telnet to any of 16 serial ports) and I'm very curious if I can monitor
these over a TCP tunnel  [ I already monitor and communicate with
industrial power-load systems remotely this way;  can a UPS really be
more primitive than one of those monsters?  You really don't want to put
a computer is a place that reconditions lead-acid batteries. :) ]

The APC UPSs beep when they need their batteries replaced or something
is wrong - but some of them are located so remotely that no one hears
them - then they die, or don't do the uninteruptable thing when the
power gets interrupted.   This finally answers the old
tree-falls-in-a-forest question;  yes - when the UPS battery dies and no
one is there to hear the beep..... a phone rings three hundred miles
away!

> We even came up with a NUT configuration / module to plug in to IPCop. There
> were some things we had to engineer / script on our own. I will get with my
> engineer and see what "common sense" thing I wanted to do which it did not
> support by default and post with those details.
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