APC (American Power Conversion)

For those who don't know, APC is a well-known manufacturer of power-protection equipement, such as UPSs and Surge protectors. An UPS is like a surge protector (protects your equpment from "too much electricity" (spikes, surges), but it has a battery pack that protect equipment in case of drop of voltage (brownout) or power outages.

I had to deal with APC support yesterday. In fact, I was a troubleshooting an issue for about une week by e-mail and I called them yesterday.

Here is my opinion about APC:

1- They make very good hardware, although I think that Powerware is offering UPSs that have more features (their 9000-serie).
2- I love their live support on their web site. It is probably the thing that makes me buy APC. I can chat directly with a sales rep before buying.
3- I don't like their software. I use Apcupsd on my Linux servers, for a reason. APC's software, PowerChute, will not install on a Linux server without having X installed. I don't install X on my server, I don't need a graphical interface on my servers. And Apcupsd gives me a lot more control. On Windows, I install PowerChute, as I don't want to install + configure cygwim to make Apcupsd work. The thing I hate about this software is that it has 3 components: server, console and agent. They recommend installing all 3 components, but not use the agent. The problem is that there are settings in the agent that are not in the server/console mix and vice-versa. Btw, Powerware's free software seems to be amazing.

APC's Web Site
Powerware's Web Site
Cyberpower's Web Site
Tripplite's Web site

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

General linux performance troubleshooting

Here's a list of commands that you should execute and then share the output to someone who can help you figure out what resource is the bottleneck in your system. Note, it requires the  sysstat  and  procps  packages (ubuntu and RHEL and its derivatives): uptime vmstat 1 10 iostat -xN 2 10 mpstat -P ALL 3 10 pidstat 1 10 free -mw (or free -m, if your OS doesn't support -w)  uptime is to see the load averages on the system. vmstat is mostly used to tell if the system is swapping or not. If you see significant numbers in the 'si' and 'so' columns, your system is most likely swapping (using the hard drive as RAM), which usually slows performance a lot. iostat is mostly used to determine if your disk subsystem is not able to cope with the load. If you see one or more lines that shows 100 or close almost constantly, it is probably the case.  If it is your swap volume, you probably saw numbers in the 'si' and 'so' columns in the  vmsta...
Read more

Networker automated recovery testing using the REST API - introduction

One feature that is lacking from Networker, compared to some of its competitors, is the built-in automatic recovery testing. However, when there's an API, there is a way.  Networker's REST API is not perfect, but it allows the backup administrator to perform queries about Networker resources (objects). As my workload is going up, I realize that one of the tasks that I tend to skip the most is the periodical recovery tests.  Don't forget that a a backup that is not tested should be considered non-successful. I also found out that my recovery tests were not diverse enough. When I started this project, I knew a little bit about REST APIs, and nothing about JSON processing. With the Networker REST API documentation, and the help of a friend and Networker Support staff, I was able to create HTTP queries with Postman,  cURL and jq . Once I got the queries that I needed, I put them in a bash script that would somehow select one backup, and then restore it. My first attem...
Read more

Tips for being a better system administrator

Here are a few tips that I have discovered or implemented during my career, that can help anyone get better results: Follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy  or better 3 copies of the data 3 different media 1 copy offsite Test your backups regularly. Ideally, automate your recovery tests. Use Whatever-as-code as much as you can. IaC is the first that comes to my mind, but using code to define objects and their properties have several advantages: Auto-documentation of changes Ability to easily rollback (using source code management like Git) Makes it easier for standardization an compliance Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt, Terraform, Pulumi are good examples Maintain a changelog of all the major changes in your infrastructure (that isn't already "documented" because you're using IaC). Keep track of your hardware inventory and plan your renewals and warranty extension purchases. Build a spreadsheet with all the components that you manage and make sure that everyone on the sysadmi...
Read more