[TriLUG] Review: Belkin Universal UPS

[Mike Johnson]

About a week ago, I purchased a Belkin 1200Va Universal UPS from Best
Buy.  With a $30 rebate, it's a pretty good deal.  Can probably be had
for less online, but watch shipping costs!  This beastie ain't light.

The reason for posting this review is because there was some question as
to its Linux compatibility.  Before you ask 'how can a glorified power
strip be Linux compatible', remember that most UPSes these days have a
serial and/or USB port to communicate with the system(s) plugged into
it.  This is so that when the power goes out, and the UPS is nearly
empty, it can signal the computer to shutdown, thus preserving your
pr0n (or whatever you happen to store on your 200GB drive).  Really good
ones can give you statistics, such as output load, runtime, input/output
voltage, etc.  Of course, all this is no good if your computer runs
Linux (or, in my case, OpenBSD) and there's only Windows based software
available.

Back to the point, the idea of getting a 1.2kVa UPS for less than $150
was too good to pass up.  I figured if it was horrible, I could return
it, so I took the leap.  Brought the heavy box home, unpacked it, hooked
it all up, and began to try various software packages.  Given that I was
going to be plugging four computers, a pretty hefty switch, and a hub
into this thing, I was very interested in a package that could
communicate over the network to remotely shutdown other systems (yes, I
know this could be scripted, but why re-invent the wheel?).  

The first on my list was NUT: http://www.exploits.org/nut/.  It's a pretty 
cool UPS manager that looks to have a lot of support, both for OSes and
UPSes.  In a word: failure.  The Belkin driver didn't work, nor did any
of the generic serial drivers.  I got two hits on the NUT mailing lists
about this UPS, and neither had answers, nor any luck.

Next I tried powerd: http://power.sourceforge.net/.  Has support for a
smaller set of UPSes, but it has a 'learn' mode.  None of the native
drivers worked, so I tried the 'learn' mode.  In this mode, you plug the
UPS into the wall, plug in the serial cable, start up the software, and
it walks you through it.  What is supposed to happen is that it tells
you to unplug the UPS and read the signal.  It then equates this signal
with 'power failure'.  You plug it back in, the signal is read, and this
becomes the 'power restored' signal.  Well, this didn't work either.

I tried some other package, can't remember its name, but it failed too,
so who cares?

Not ready to give up just yet, I found a mention that there was software
from Belkin that worked under Linux.  A few minutes later (gotta love
broadband), I had it downloaded and installed.  It has a client server
architecture, the two communicating with each other over RPC.  This
enables you to have the server on the system that plugs into the serial
(or USB) port on the UPS and clients on all the systems that get power
from the UPS.  This worked!  Finnally, I was getting graphs and dials
and logs and statistics and all that.

Great, so I have a high capacity UPS with decent software, and all is
right with the world, right?  Ehh, not so much.  All the systems I care
about are OpenBSD.  Not such a big deal, given the Linux compatibility
layers they have built in, but this only works if the CPU arch is the
same.  Well, three out of the four computers are Sparcs.  Oh, and did I
mention that Belkin software is binary only?  And that the client
requires X and that nothing X related is installed on any of my servers?

I'm not giving up yet, I'll plug the systems in and hope that NUT
catches up.  At the least, its better than what I have now, which is no
UPS for any of those systems.  

In conclusion, if you have a Linux box with X on it (or, at the least,
X-libs and remote X), it seems like a decent UPS/software combination.

This message has been brought to you by the letters P, S, and U.

Mike
-- 
"Let the power of Ponch compel you!  Let the power of Ponch compel you!"
   -- Zorak on Space Ghost

GNUPG Key fingerprint = ACD2 2F2F C151 FB35 B3AF  C821 89C4 DF9A 5DDD 95D1
GNUPG Key = http://www.enoch.org/mike/mike.pubkey.asc
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