I’m down to the last few hours of discounts here. I need to get my NAS and my server onto a UPS months ago. Both are already set to come back on when power restores. We rarely have power outages and have solar panels (no house battery though), so a full outage is even rarer.
I understand that a UPS can send a shutdown signal when power is lost. Is this a universal standard or format for this? If so, what keywords should i use when searching for compatible products? My father told me to look for one with Ethernet ports. I just want to make sure everything is compatible. I go out of town occasionally and as well as preventing data loss, I also need everything to go down and come back up automatically so I don’t have to call a friend, neighbor, or my spouse to go mess with stuff for me.
UPS brands considered (alternatives welcome): APC, Cyberpower
Systems protected, Synology DS 220+ & BeeLink MiniPC running Debian 12.
Also, for anyone who has helped me out previously in my self-hosted journey, thank you! Things are going great and I have a few useful docker images running various services and have set up grub btrfs snapshots to easily fix my screwups. This community has been incredibly helpful.
There isn’t a standard that is broadly-adopted, but NUT (https://networkupstools.org/) has reverse-engineered drivers for nearly every UPS out there, usually each brand has their standard so as long as the brand is supported it will work. (NUT is also what TrueNAS, Synology, QNAP, etc use internally for their UPS support)
I’ve had good luck with using NUT with APC UPSes (both consumer models and buying used enterprise rack-mount models).
One cool thing you can do with NUT is share the UPS state over the network, so that multiple machines can respond to the power state instead of just the machine that is plugged in via USB directly.
The UPS driver that delivers to my home office a bag of electronic goodies every week couldn’t care less about what OS I use. I mean I even tried to tell him about all the awesome Minty Pops and Arches and all he had to say was “that Fedora looks fucking dope, bro. Say, do you listen to Hannah Montana?”
I use DHL
Eaton is your best bet for compatibility in the consumer market.
I use a USB connection to my UPS for the shutdown signal not Ethernet
In an area power outage, if one keeps the router alive via UPS does the router have anything to talk to? In my case I am “Fiber to the node”, there is a box on the sidewalk at the other end of the block that receives the fiber, then copper to my house.
Not really, under an area blackout the fiberoptic transmitters will stop working, so you won’t be able to reach other areas/nodes even if your equipment has UPS power.
But, in general, the idea of a UPS is to provide enough supply to allow for an orderly shutdown, preventing equipment damage or data loss. Its not meant for long term operations.
For infrastructure and other critical applications, the UPS is designed to give you enough time to go start the diesel generator, and continue the operations.
As a bonus, some UPS have filters to ensure that delicate electronics get a nice, clean power wave. This is usually the case in UPS for data centres.
Btw, how are you liking down under’s “revolutionary” idea of Fibre + Copper? Is it as bad as it sounds?
Well, I am not in Australia, but so far my AT&T Uverse has worked well. We don’t need the VOIP or TVOIP we use our cell phones and don’t watch TV so it’s all Internet.
When my internet goes down, my devices can still talk to each other. So while I can’t use the internet, I can still stream my shows and access my files and whatnot.
That’s not what a UPS is for though. If everything between you and the ISP had a UPS (including all the infra under the roads and whatnot), you could probably keep the internet going in a power outage. But that’s incredibly unlikely.
