[kwlug-disc] UPS recommendations?

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

Hello all ...

Had a bad experience with the UPS yesterday
(more on that below if you are interested), but
the result is that I now looking for a UPS to replace
the one I had.

The old one is a 1200VA APC Back-UPS that was
over 15 years old. The battery was changed a few
times on it.

The new UPS should be 1500VA tower style, and
able to interface with Linux in order to shut down the
home server if minutes remaining are below some
threshold.

This one at BestBuy has good reviews.

https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/cyberpower-1500va-ups-battery-backup-gx1500u-fc/14538697

This one is considerably less, but has less outlets (not
an issue in my use case), but is cheaper, and coupled
with Costco's excellent return policy, it is risk free.
The reviews (in French) mainly complain about a high
pitch noise. Since it will go in the basement, this may
not be noticeable.

https://www.costco.ca/cyberpower-cst150uc-fc-battery-backup---ups-with-surge-protection.product.4000223432.html

There is also this one at Staples, but the Costco one
has the same features for less.

https://www.staples.ca/products/3040144-en-cyberpower-1500va-10-outlet-battery-backup-ups-system-black

With APC UPS's, I used the apcupsd package, and it did what
needed to be done. About a year ago, I moved the cable from
UPS to go from it to my OpenWRT router, and configured apcupsd
on the router, so it can shutdown the server if the UPS has less
than x minutes left. That way, the router and internet will remain
available for longer in case of an outage, but not the server.

I would like to continue to use something similar, e.g. NUT
(Network UPS Tools) or even CyberPower's PowerPanel if
it came to that.

What happened is that we had a short somewhere else in the
house that tripped a GFI circuit. I was trying to isolate where
the issue is by testing the circuit breakers from the panel.
When the breaker that the UPS was on was tripped, the UPS
never came back. It said ON BATTERY instead of ON LINE. It
was reading the voltage as 99V instead of 115V or thereabouts.

The router shutdown the server, and kept the internet on as
planned. But here is the bad part: when I rebooted the server
the router kept getting status SHUTTING DOWN and voltage
as 99 from the UPS, and once the server booted, it was shutdown.
There was no time to login and see what is going on.

I resorted to booting the server from Finnix on a USB key, mounting
the root disk, doing a chroot on that mountpoint, then doing an

apt purge apcupsd

Finally, the server could boot again.

So any thoughts welcome on UPS recommendations.
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