UPS configuration

[Gary Yu]

Hi all,

I guess many of the members in this forum have experienced the big blackout last week, hope no serious damages occured to any of your servers. We survived thanks to our UPS, but it seemed that the auto shutdown didn't kick off, we have to manually shutdown while the battery still last. I have some question regarding UPS configuration. We are using HP power trust II UPS, along with "HP UPS Manager II Version B.03.10" which comes with the ups.

there's a /etc/ups_mond (links to /usr/lbin/ups_mond) installed with HPUX, and there're lots of threads in the forum discuss its configuration, but my understanding is that while using UPS Manager, we shouldn't let the ups_mond started, it may confilct with the ups manager, right?

regarding the autoshutdown, we can set it through ups manager's admin interface (upsmgrascii), but how do these settings work with configurations in /etc/ups_conf ? or ups_conf doesn't count at all since ups_mond didn't started?

thanks,
Gary

[Pete Randall]

Gary,

You're heading in the right direction - ups_conf has nothing to do with UPS Manager II. Ignore it and do any configuration through the admin interface.


Pete

[twang]

The procedure could be:
1. connect the cable from UPS to W-cable's serial (UPS) port on server
2. Once HP-UX is running, use SAM (Peripheral Devices) to configure the PowerTrust UPS.
You can specify:
a. the port to be used (geneally /dev/tty1p1)
b. whether to activiate or deactivate the automatic shutdown feature entirely.
c. the shutdown_delay_mins parameter (default 1 minute)
d. the shutdown_timeout_mins parameter. This value must be longer than the longest time that shutdown may take on the system, not to exceed the battery capacity. I recommend use value of 10 minutes.

For detail, refer to ups_mond and ups_conf man pages for more information

3. Verify by checking for UPS message in /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log.
Messages appear whenever ups_mond starts, and whenever the PowerTrust detects some reportable condition.

4. change /etc/inittab
ups0::off:rtprio 0 /usr/lbin/ups_mond -f /etc/ups_conf
to
ups0::resprawn:rtprio 0 /usr/lbin/ups_mond -f /etc/ups_conf

[Gary Yu]

thanks Pete for the confirmation. what confused me is in what case ups_conf and ups_mond shall be used, from the man page, it said ups_mond is "HP PowerTrust UPS monitor daemon" and we are using PowerTrust ... but search in the knowledge base FAQ, I found someone said ups_mond should be disabled from boot time.

thanks,
Gary

[Pete Randall]

Configuring through SAM will give you a ups_conf/ups_mond setup. This would be fine and is, in fact, what I use even though I have UPS Manager II. However, if you want to use UPS Manager II, you need to avoid ups_conf/ups_mond.


Pete

[Gary Yu]

thanks (again) Pete and twang, I think I'm more cleared now, either HP UPS Manager II or ups_mond/ups_conf can be used, but they can not be used together, and I think ups_mond/ups_conf is useful while server is connected to ups DIRECTLY, but in our case, one UPS powers 2 racks, which has 10 servers mounted on them, I have no choice but using UPS Manager II... am I right?

thanks,
Gary

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

You're exactly right, Gary. UPS Manager II is like the OpenView of ups products, designed to run in a kind of client server fashion monitoring multiple ups units connected to multiple server clients - just what you're looking for.


Pete