MinutemanUPS.com

Wayne · Joined: 27 Jun 2000 Posts: 5 Location: Quebec, Canada

I have a Pro 650 connected to a Pentium3 server with a small 14" monitor. I know that the wall supply is far from perfect, our neighbor's machines cause the UPS to kick-in battery more a couple times every hour, but that always lasts less than 10 seconds, so the battery is kept charged. This, i don'T mind. I'd need another type of UPS to prevent this, but this works fine anyway. The problem is that once every couple days/weeks/months (it varies terribly), the server will be shut down drastically for no reason. Users complain that the server is unreachable, so I walk in the server room only to find the UPS happily shining the green light with a powered down server aside of it.

Logging every possible data with the sentry software won't show any sign as to what causes the power down. An oscilloscope on the line shows that the voltage varies of a couple volts everytime the neighbor plays with his machinery, but the frequency is very stable.

Even if the input voltage would drop considerably, the UPS should never fail to send output to the server. I'd understand if I had a battery low problem, but in my case the battery stays quite charged.

The battery has been replaced a few months ago, and it did not change the behavior of the UPS.

Any ideas? I can't leave the server connected to the UPS right now because there are less power failures from the electricity company than from the UPS that should be protecting me.

jmoore · Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 9:26 am Post subject:

Wayne,

I would like to simulate a power outage by pulling the plug from your wall socket and then let me know what happens?

We are going to test the battery to make sure the computer stays on.

You said you have the software running...
What software are you running?

Sentry1.48 ?
SentryII ?

Jeff

[This message has been edited by jmoore (edited October 29, 2002).]

Wayne · Joined: 27 Jun 2000 Posts: 5 Location: Quebec, Canada

quote:
Originally posted by jmoore:
I would like to simulate a power outage by pulling the plug from your wall socket and then let me know what happens?

This works very well. UPS will kick in with the battery, server stays up. I can do that several times in a row, it still works. I'm curious though, when the users won't be needing it, i'll go and try to plug/unplug it like 100 times to see. Maybe one in every N times it fails. But right now, testing it a bunch of times works.

quote:

You said you have the software running...
What software are you running?

Sentry1.48 ?
SentryII ?

SentryII fails miserably on both my NT server and on a win200 desktop. (It fails to establish a communication with my Pro 650, even though all settings seem to be right). I couldn't test on my win98 laptop because the SentryII installer crashes with some number error. (I'll retry to install that later today).

The software (Sentry1.48) used to run on my NT server, but a year or so ago I had to grab the serial port for a fax, so no more monitoring.

Wayne

[This message has been edited by Wayne (edited October 29, 2002).]

jmoore · Posted: Fri Nov 01, 2002 9:26 am Post subject:

Wayne,
I have not been able to simulate that problem here in house. If you have changed the battery and all is well when testing then you could have a UPS problem. Maybe it is time to have some diagnostics run on your UPS. Your UPS may have a component going bad these happen over time. The flat rate of repair is $112.00.

Have you tried to run the server on another UPS systme and see if the Server has the same problem. (Power supplies have been known to go out from time to time.)

I want you to e-mail me direct at jmoore@minutemanups.com I would like you to try a new version of SentryII that I have been testing.

Jeff