Proper shutdown sequence

[Anonymous user]

Folks, I am a new APC customer and I got a BR900GI UPS about a week ago. The reason I got the UPS is to avoid damage to my computers due to power spikes or deeps and to have the computers shut down gracefully when a power outage occurs.

What I wanted to cover with the UPS is:

- one Apple Mac Mini Server
- one PC running Centos 6
- one Apple iMac
- two Linksys dd-wrt powered routers
- one D-link ADSL modem

The UPS is working just fine and it is covering all equipment fine, at about 45% of load capacity. It is connected via USB cable to the iMac and I am using apcupsd daemon to control the power-down in all the computers. My question is this:

What is the best shutdown strategy that you would suggest for this small network? I guess the servers should power themselves off, before the iMac, so that they have enough time to gracefully shut down. Then the iMac should power itself off and put the UPS in hibernate mode? After how much time? The default for apcupsd is 10 seconds, but I find that too little, once I had the iMac switch off, when the UPS went to hibernation before the iMac had completed its shutdown process.

However, if I power down the servers before the iMac, there is a risk that the servers will be powered up again, since the UPS hasn't cut off power to them. So should I just power all computers down at the same time and cause the UPS to hibernate -say- 20 seconds after that?

Any help you can provide, ideas etc, would be greatly appreciated.

Message was edited by: sv1cec

[voidstar_apc]

Hi John,

The easiest shutdown strategy, as you've noted, is to shut them all down at once.

Our newest SmartUPSes have outlet groups that would allow turning off power to the servers separately from the iMac which would give the iMacs a little more runtime... but that's not what we're working with here. And it might be possible to jury-rig APCUPSd to wake up the servers when power resumes using wake-on-lan and a bit of scripting, but it's not something the works out of the box today.

You do want to find out how long it takes your equipment to shut down so that you can set an appropriate shutdown delay.

Hope that helps.

[Anonymous user · Accepted solution]

Thanks for coming back to me, appreciated.

Yes, I figured out that it's best to shut everything down together. And thank God, Macs (and my PC) can get powered-up when the power returns, without any scripting, it's an option in the OS-X to power up again after a power failure. And the PC, I set the BIOS accordingly and it powers up fine.

However, this morning, when I was doing some tests with the UPS, I noticed that when the power was returned to the UPS, a circuit breaker went down in the house. As if when the UPS wakes up from hibernation, it draws too much current. I'll do another test tomorrow morning to see if it happens again. So far, that's the only glitch in my ... strategy (LoRL).

First time I got an APC UPS and it seems that it was a good investment. Together with apcupsd, it can provide some good protection for our family network.

Thanks again.