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So I have two APC UPS devices: Back-UPS ES 500 and 725. These two UPSes work fine but recently we had an extended outage and both of our servers connected to these UPSes shutdown and one of them had a RAID Drobo that suffered disk damage.

Now I need to figure out how to make both of these machines shutdown gracefully when the batteries in the UPSes get low. I am looking at APCUPSD from this post:

Configuring power outage shutdown via APC UPS's

I like the program but I have some weird issues. I'm not sure how to connect these UPSes to the Ubuntu servers. The UPSes both have phone jacks (for protection) and one network jack for, presumably, communication. The ES 725 has two coaxial jacks as well.

Am I to assume that I need some kind of network to USB cable for communication between my servers and these UPSes? Any hints or feedback would be very appreciated.

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nicorellius
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1 Answers1

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Unfortunately, you're a bit out of luck. The Back-UPS ES line does not offer monitoring connections. From APC you will need to look at the Smart-UPS line for either Serial or USB connections.

EDIT: I read the manual to fast and gave bad information before. Your UPS models do have monitoring connections and should have come with a special RJ-45->USB cable. This connection replaced the serial connection that older Back-UPS lines used. If yours do not have valid network jacks, then you can use that cable to directly monitor the devices.

Scott Pack
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  • After I posted the above question, I discovered that apcupsd allegedly supports SNMP for most UPSes, including the Back-UPS line... What you do is connect the UPS to a router and use DHCP to dish an IP and then configure from there... From the manual: "apcupsd supports nearly every APC brand UPS model in existence and enough different cable types to connect to all of them." Hopefully this means my configuration too ;--) – nicorellius Dec 08 '10 at 20:48
  • My mistake, according to the manual the in the ES line only the 500 and 700 have that port. – Scott Pack Dec 08 '10 at 21:05
  • This seems interesting. I actually don't have the cables you refer to, because the UPSes are old. But I do have one of those RJ-45 to USB cables I could try. Thanks. – nicorellius Dec 08 '10 at 23:06