UPS Replaced!

We had yet another power outage today! EXPIV was seriously fuckered when the power came back on, just like last time.

Thing is, I bought a new UPS yesterday. I just neglected to set it up.

So, I set it up. And while BOT House was offline I gave it a much needed cleaning. It was caked with dust and cat hair. Very nasty.

Instead of going with a cheap Chinese knock-off, this time I bought an APC Smart UPS (which was probably made in China anyway but what the fuck).

The last UPS had a serial port connection. It was probably the last of its kind because everything is USB these days. So I had some fucking around to do. EXPIV has had a USB UPS since it was EXPIII so I just copied the config files over. It didn't work! In fact it seems the UPS on EXPIV has never worked, which explains why it was always fucked up whenever the power went out. So I had two boxes to fix.

I fixed EXPIV first, because, like I said, it was fucked up. After I un-fucked it (it turns out mounting a JFS root partition with errors=ro is very bad idea - it fixes itself at boot but never remounts read/write), I set about getting the UPS to run right. When I proceeded to fix BOT House I discovered I was using two different versions of Network UPS Tools (NUT). The old version worked fine with the new UPS, but the new version of NUT seemed more capable, even though EXPIV's UPS (also an APC) has less features.

So I bit the bullet and built the new version for BOT House.

The dust has settled and everything's working fine now. We should be good to go for the next power outage/brownout.

Famous last words.