On Jun 25, 2017, at 8:53 AM, Philip Rhoades wrote:

> I don't understand why most of the UPS offerings available do not come 
> standard with a LAN port? Why is this?

As others have mentioned, it probably comes down to cost for a port that is not 
frequently used.

Something to consider is that there are add-on cards with LAN ports for mid- to 
upper-tier UPSes. Some cards also have environmental monitoring options as well.

On the other hand, these cards do not seem to be high-volume items, and the 
prices reflect that. If you don't need fancy temperature sensing, a Raspberry 
Pi or other single-board computer is IMHO a better way to spend that money (and 
it will probably turn out to be more versatile).

One thing about the NUT master/slave architecture is that it forces you to 
consider the shutdown order. The NUT master is responsible for commanding the 
UPS to turn off the power, so at that point, the master system should not be 
depending on any other systems for their services. A LAN card with SNMP doesn't 
really enforce this hierarchy, but then again, there are probably some 
high-availability cases where SNMP makes more sense.

> Do people have suggestions about my options?  I have two main machines - say 
> 250-400W total and a few small devices inc a Billion router and some USB 
> devices.

Be sure to factor your network infrastructure into that power estimate - you 
will want the network links between NUT master and slave systems to be on 
battery power as well, or else the master will resort to guessing  the status 
of the slaves.

> It would be nice to have at say 5-10 minutes battery backup before sending 
> shutdown messages to the Linux machines.

When you take the 5-10 minutes of runtime and turn that into a requirement for 
battery capacity, it is worth considering what amount of reserve power you 
would want in case you need to briefly power up a machine during an extended 
outage. I would also recommend buying an UPS that allows you to adjust its low 
battery threshold in terms of estimated remaining runtime (and not just 
percentage of full charge), as this should prevent surprises later as the 
battery ages. (The UPS should keep track of changes in runtime for a given load 
as part of its periodic calibration, automatic or manual.) The NUT variable for 
this limit is "battery.runtime.low" (expressed in seconds).

This brings me to the Device Dump List: http://new.networkupstools.org/ddl/ (or 
http://networkupstools.org/ddl/ if the first link is not working). Because 
suggestions are an inherently subjective topic, we have some user-provided data 
dumps of the readable and read/write values provided by many UPS vendors. We 
also try to flag values that are problematic in some way (wrong scale factor, 
doesn't ever update, etc). Ideally, we would fix this in the driver, but in 
some cases, that can be difficult to fix without breaking something else.

A more subtle aspect of the DDL is that you can see how the underlying firmware 
changes over time for the same marketing model name. For instance, there are 
two versions of the Tripp-Lite OMNIVS1000 with different internals, and as 
such, slightly different feature sets. Feel free to ask about any of these 
results - the underlying DDL repository has some links back to the source of 
these reports. You can often find discussions for other devices in the 
nut-upsuser archives.



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