"Unexpected Shutdown" reported even though it was (allegedly) managed.

[BillP]

Just want to see if this is normal.

I have PowerChute set to preseve battery power and initiate a shutdown after 1 minuted on battery. Client had a blackout today and PowerChute software reports it did a manged shutdown today at the corresponding time of blackout. PowerChute reports the server was on battery for 1 min 21 secs and user reports that the server was on for about 3 mins before fully turning off.

All that makes sense to me. The software report of 1 min 21secs on battery makes sense as it would only be able to track time before the APC service was shutdown as part of the managed shutdown. The total on time of about 3 mins also makes sense as ~2 mins to shutoff the server (after the command was given) is about right.

However, when the server came back up, it had the computer was unexpectdly shutoff "tell me why" bit that server 2003 has in cases of unexpected shutdown. While I have, of course, seen this message when the power went out without an UPS attached to it, I was wondering if it is normal for it to still ask for a shutdown reason if it was successfully shutdown via the PowerChute software.

Thanks all for any insight you can shed on this.

[BillP]

i believe it is. if you havent disabled that "unexpected shutdown" reasoning dialog box, powerchute does not have the ability to add anything into this box.

is this powerchute personal edition or business edition?

[BillP]

Thank you for the response.

It's personal edition and I suspected that Server was going to gripe because it did not get a reason. Nice to have some coroboration on that suspicion. I am very happy, though, that it looks like PowerChute is able to force it past the "reason point" and get it shut off which is just fine with me.

It didn't even occur to me to shutdown event tracker though, thanks for mentioning that. Does bus. edition have the ability to supply a reason though? I have never played around with that edition though I've heard that it is a good bit limited than PE. I have to say that with PE combined with the newer and somewhat higher end models, I am impressed with the functionality (ability to to do on-demand self test etc...).

Thanks again for the response and please feel free to add anything.

[BillP · Accepted solution]

no APC software adds anything to the event tracker as far as i know. 😕

if you want i can test it out to be sure though.