General Questions

What would be the best way to monitor an ups for an automatic shutdown on a power outage?

This time of year in Florida we see an avg of one a day sometimes more in this area I live in.

running the latest beta (1.3b16) as a image off a hard drive.

I'd start with the software supplied with the UPS. But this will not run on m0n0wall, and won't shut down a m0n0wall, nor is it related to m0n0wall.

then starting as you suggest wouldn't work. Sometimes bad advice is worse than no advice.

And don't worry I'll install nuts to do the job and won't be back if this is the kind of treatment one can expect here.

m0n0 has nothing in it to do UPS monitoring if thats what your goal. If you can trigger a script to be executed from a remote machine that is monitoring the UPS then you simply need to do a post to /exec.php w/the proper http auth credentials.

would also recommend running m0n0 off compact flash or cd-image/thumb disk so sudden power loss has little risk of messing anything up. I dont know about you but I try to keep the network up at all costs and power down just the servers to increase battery life. But if your experiencing regular outages you may prefer to extend overall battery cycle-life by preventing it from deep discharging.

another possibility would be a managed pdu, could instruct ups to manually power off specific devices without needing to connect directly to those devices, good if you want to take your switchs/router/modem/access points down and bring them back up in a specific order or based upon remaining battery.

nayr ,
thanks for your informed reply it is appreciated.
I have nuts working just peachy now.
On a power outage the m0n0wall box shuts down and when power is restored it starts up.
No more worry on having fried or scrambled equipment now.

I also try to keep everything up as long as possible but in this part of Fl we lose power at least once a day and can have several short time outages ( of 2 mins to 5 mins ). It's that time of yr here so it is needed.

I have a huge 15kw eaton and we use small apc 1000 ups's at each station for redundancy so shutdowns are really minimal but nice to have working for peace of mind.

Some motherboard bioses in the power section have a "restart after power loss". It may be worded differently depending on the motherboard. That's what I use.