Along with getting a new home wireless setup, I also picked up a cheapo UPS (CyberPower 550VA), which I intended to use for my Infrant fileserver and networking gear. The goal was to make sure that the fileserver could ride out small glitches (of which we seem to get one per month) and also to allow it enable all of its caching and such. In theory, the Infrant box talks to a UPS over USB, allowing it to shut down gracefully before the battery dies.

Here's a trace from last night, from the emails sent to me by my fileserver:

Quote:
UPS is on battery power. (Sun, 19 Feb 2006 23:54:27 -04120)
UPS is on battery power. (Sun, 19 Feb 2006 23:54:54 -04120)
UPS is on line power. (Sun, 19 Feb 2006 23:54:54 -04120)
Improper shutdown detected. (Mon, 20 Feb 2006 00:49:11 -04120)

I'm not 100% sure how to read this, but it looks like the UPS correctly notified my fileserver when I had a 30-second power glitch (all the clocks were blinking in the morning). However, not quite an hour later, the fileserver found itself rudely awaken, perhaps implying that line power might have actually never come back and the UPS had drained itself without notifying the fileserver.

Should I blame the UPS for not properly notifying my fileserver? Any other theories? I suppose I can always experiment with deliberate unplugging and replugging when I get home tonight...

Now that I'm home and can look at the actual logs, it appears that the actual order of events was battery - line - battery - power failure - restart. As such, the missing event that should have happened is the UPS telling the fileserver that it was time to shut down before it ran out of juice.

Reading over postings on the Infrant support BBS, it seems that my UPS isn't officially supported, but it could well be emulating an APC. The next step is going to be installing the Windows-specific software and seeing if I can reconfigure the UPS to send the shutdown message sooner...