Update 10/29/07: new event 61453 - electrical noise (bold)
After I installed my new APC RS1300LCD UPS (see post) I found out that the Powerchute Business edition monitoring software I was using is not compatible with the RS1300LCD UPS, you have to use Powerchute Personal edition (unless you use a hack). It seems APC has decided to distinguish their workstation UPS' from their server UPS'. I can understand that the server UPS' should provide more data and configuration option, however the Business edition software should work with both segments of the market.
The feature I wanted to continue using from Powerchute Business edition was the ability to email me UPS events. Windows Vista has the ability to trigger tasks based on log events. These tasks can include an email trigger. Rather than fiddle with the Business edition hack I decided to use this route and I currently have identified 3 UPS events.
- Self Test passed - event id - 61452
- Battery backup transferred to battery due to a blackout - event id 174
- Battery backup transferred to AC utility power - event id 61455
- PowerChute not communicating with the battery backup - event id 61456 (usually happens on a system resume)
- PowerChute recommenced communicating with the battery backup - event id 61465
- Battery backup transferred to battery power due to electrical noise - event id 61453 (I have never seen this event before but I was glad I had a UPS, the event lasted 5 seconds)
The tasks are easily created using the start (right click on computer) manage Computer Management plug in. The log events can be found in Event Viewer/Windows Logs/Application. You can easily create the task by right clicking on the event or by manually creating task in the Computer Management Console under System tools/Task Scheduler/Task Scheduler Library/Event Viewer Tasks.
Since the email trigger requires an SMTP relay server, I use 1st SMTP Server which works well although I would love to run it as a service. In order to catch all the events to decide what I want to keep, I also created a catch all tasks with APC UPS Service as the event source, so I can decide if I want to track other UPS events.
Power went out, good test for my FIOS setup
The power went out around 8:10 am (I will have to check my logs for the correct time). My Wireless network is and FIOS are still up and running thanks to my 3 APC BACK-UPS ES-350 bricks I have my network equipment attached to (my setup). This will be a good test of my setup and how FIOS handles power outages.
My XPS 720 attached to an APC RS 1300 LCD shutdown in an orderly fashion after it determined that it only had 5 minutes of power.
It is now 8:35AM (25 minutes), I will update this thread periodically.
Update: The power was out for a little over 1 hour, the power was restored for about 5 minutes about 40 minutes into the outage. I never lost access to the Internet or my land line both on FIOS, I did find a couple of minor issues in my setup:
It looks like the outage affected about 73,000 homes in Northern, no word on what caused it.
The key point to this test was that I never lost FIOS, I wonder how folks did with Comcast...
Posted by sskarlatos on March 11, 2008 at 08:08 AM in APC, Comcast, Commentary, Dell XPS 720, Verizon FIOS | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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