On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 04:07:05PM +, Aneurin Price wrote:
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Lydgate deb...@tenebrific.ath.cx wrote:
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 12:38:25PM +, Aneurin Price wrote:
That's not a realistic answer. A decent UPS is likely to cost as much
as the computer.
Sorry to derail the thread, but my recent experience with a UPS costing
30 GBP and which uses the megatec_usb driver for NUT suggests otherwise.
It happily keeps my machine running for up to 15 minutes in a powercut
and shuts it down if the battery gets too low. Works really well, has
already seen action in the two months I've had it.
What make/model is it? All the UPSes I've looked at in that cost region
claimed to have a battery life under load of more like two minutes, which
isn't even certain to be long enough to shut down, depending on what
you're doing with the machine. (It's fortunate that Linux systems tend to
shut down fairly quickly. Windows Server 2003 seems to need *at least*
15 minutes, and shutting down is a high-load activity so battery
duration is likely to be toward the lower end of the estimate.)
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/130477
On ebuyer it's called a Plexus V 500VA. I've read elsewhere that this
is marketed under different brands/names. In the states I think it
might be branded and sold by Fry's Electronics.
To be fair, it is rated at 2 minutes under full load. However I only
run a single HP ProLiant ML-110 G4 on it. It's Debian Lenny with just
personal e-mail server and webserver. Nothing super critical but it's
annoying enough when it goes down that I'd pay 33 pounds for it not to.
I've measured it and this machine draws 100 VA when relatively idle, 140
VA with CPU and hard drives loaded.
Lasts 15 minutes in that state. I haven't yet tested it under normal
load. I mainly just want to avoid the annoyance of having it die when
there's a 20 second powercut (which happens often enough in my area).
The other (rare) possibility is when we completely drain our top-up
electricity, and then no UPS is going to survive the cut, so in that
case it just powers it down after 10 minutes or 20 minutes or however
long it lasts.
NUT wasn't entirely straightforward to set up as the Debian, had to
manually set up 2.4.x. But it only took me an hour or so to figure out.
NUT can shut down the computer (or run any other arbitrary script).
Only annoyance is that the UPS beeps loudly. With NUT I set it up to
send it a signal to turn off the beeps when detects battery power. The
result is that it beeps once or twice then stops, which I can live with.
Otherwise I couldn't be happier. For a small price, the outages have
become a source of satisfaction rather than annoyance :)
Lydgate
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