I’m down to the last few hours of discounts here. I need to get my NAS and my server onto a UPS months ago. Both are already set to come back on when power restores. We rarely have power outages and have solar panels (no house battery though), so a full outage is even rarer.
I understand that a UPS can send a shutdown signal when power is lost. Is this a universal standard or format for this? If so, what keywords should i use when searching for compatible products? My father told me to look for one with Ethernet ports. I just want to make sure everything is compatible. I go out of town occasionally and as well as preventing data loss, I also need everything to go down and come back up automatically so I don’t have to call a friend, neighbor, or my spouse to go mess with stuff for me.
UPS brands considered (alternatives welcome): APC, Cyberpower
Systems protected, Synology DS 220+ & BeeLink MiniPC running Debian 12.
Also, for anyone who has helped me out previously in my self-hosted journey, thank you! Things are going great and I have a few useful docker images running various services and have set up grub btrfs snapshots to easily fix my screwups. This community has been incredibly helpful.
There isn’t a standard that is broadly-adopted, but NUT (https://networkupstools.org/) has reverse-engineered drivers for nearly every UPS out there, usually each brand has their standard so as long as the brand is supported it will work. (NUT is also what TrueNAS, Synology, QNAP, etc use internally for their UPS support)
I’ve had good luck with using NUT with APC UPSes (both consumer models and buying used enterprise rack-mount models).
One cool thing you can do with NUT is share the UPS state over the network, so that multiple machines can respond to the power state instead of just the machine that is plugged in via USB directly.
NUT works with many UPS models and provides monitoring and control
If for some reason you don’t like the look of NUT, and you get an APC UPS (and maybe some others?), there is always
apcupsd. It will run shell scripts upon certain events, etc. Old, simple, works.I’m using apcupsd for my server, even wrote a little script to pull wattage off the apc and report it in byobu’s status bar. Anytime I ssh into my server I can see current wattage (usually about 55W for 4 spinning rust drives, 2 SSDs plus the router).
I use DHL
The UPS driver that delivers to my home office a bag of electronic goodies every week couldn’t care less about what OS I use. I mean I even tried to tell him about all the awesome Minty Pops and Arches and all he had to say was “that Fedora looks fucking dope, bro. Say, do you listen to Hannah Montana?”
cyberpower ups has their own utility on their website called powerpanel. versions exist for windows, linux and macos.
apcupsd for apc units is found in many distributions, including debian. for synology, this might lead you in the right direction: https://old.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/gtkjam/use_synology_nas_as_ups_server_to_safely_power/
The Linux one only works on some architectures. Notably, you can’t run it on a raspberry pi.
NUT worked fine on everything I thrown at it. Both nice branded ones (Eaton…) And cheapo UPSs unbranded.
Eaton is your best bet for compatibility in the consumer market.
I use a USB connection to my UPS for the shutdown signal not Ethernet
Was very confused why this was being asked. Was not aware there was a mechanism to send a shutdown signal. Thanks.
