FreeBSD and UPS's

[Sandy Rutherford]

Michael,

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 you wrote:

 > I was just curious if FreeBSD supports any of the UPS's that have the 
 > automated powerdown feature in the event of powerloss (APM)?

I'm using apcupsd with an APC Back-UPS Pro 650 under FreeBSD 4.10.  It
works great, including automatic powerdown.  There are some
configuration issues with FreeBSD, which I quote:

  In the FreeBSD OS, there is no known way for a user program to get
  control when all the disks are synced. This is needed for apcupsd to
  be able to issue the killpower command to the UPS so that the UPS
  shuts off the power. To accomplish the same thing on FreeBSD systems,
  make sure you have a SmartUPS and that your UPS shutdown grace period
  is set sufficiently long so that you system will power down (usually 2
  minutes), then use the kill-on-powerfail option on the apcupsd command
  line.

You use the command `apctest' to set the UPS shutdown grace period in
the UPS's EEPROM.  It was straightforward.

For smart UPS's with USB connections, I recall seeing some problems
reports on the apcupsd email list regarding FreeBSD.  However, my UPS
uses a serial connection, so I didn't pay much attention.

Sandy