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From: ram@imagen.com (M.V.S. Ramanath)
Subject: Re: APC UPS owners or potential buyers, trying to show user base
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References: <316bjc$hlh@thor.tjhsst.edu> <317k55$kq3@news.halcyon.com>
Date: 29 Jul 94 16:58:21 GMT
Lines: 32
mpdillon@coho.halcyon.com (Michael Dillon) writes:
>In article <316bjc$hlh@thor.tjhsst.edu>,
>Craig Metz <cmetz@thor.tjhsst.edu> wrote:
>> I had a talk today with Debbie Gray (sp?) of American Power Conversion
>>regarding trying to get information on how to communicate with their Smart
>>UPS products' onboard controllers in order to write a Linux driver. APC is
>>one of the *many* manufacturers that plays the old NDA game, i.e., ``we
>>consider that to be proprietary information that we have to protect''. H
>Really now! Those boxes use an RS-232 interface, right? What do they tell
>the computer? If they only communicate one thing (power fail) then it
>is probably something as simple as shorting the RD and SD lines. Get a
>technician to check it out for you while you pull the plug.
>If they are giving more info than that, then it probably can be
>reverse engineered with simple program to monitor the incoming
>serial port.
>I remember a UPS that we set up about 7 years ago. I provided two terminals
>on the box that it shorted together when the power failed. We hooked
>them up to pins 2 and 3 on a serial port and made a little shell script
>daemon that periodically checked for powerfail every five minutes. When
>it got two hits in a row, it shutdown the system.
<... stuff deleted ...>
In June 1993, Ronald Florence (ron@mlfarm.com) posted a small C
program that can be run as a daemon from /etc/rc.local to
comp.sys.sun.hardware. This may be adequate for most people.
Ram (speaking only for me etc.)