1 UPS 2 PCs?

Grebuloner

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 31, 2009
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So, this has been a pretty tough season for me in terms of power utility reliability. Every time there's some kind of storm (or not), we have a rough power outage, the kind that starts with 10 seconds of brownout before quick on/off cycles and then it finally goes dark. Well, it's killing my computers and equipment, and while I have a UPS on my main system, I'm planning on buying some more for the not-as-important other systems in the house.

Here's the real question: In one room, I have my home fileserver and a power sucking DC system. The server uses maybe 50 watts when it isn't booting. I would like to use a single UPS for both systems and have it report its status to both so that they can automatically shut down when the power goes out.

The popular, reliable, and often on sale CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD I'm using in my office has USB and serial connections. Is it possible to connect one to each computer and both will receive the battery state info?
 
eaiest way to find out is to try it. you already got it. connect one connector to each system, set up the software and pull the plug. see what happens. its not gonna hurt to try.
 
If that doesn't work, you could use psexec from either and have it send a shutdown command to the other.
 
eaiest way to find out is to try it. you already got it. connect one connector to each system, set up the software and pull the plug. see what happens. its not gonna hurt to try.

It didn't ship with a serial cable, so I thought I'd ask first.

I'll look into psexec, thanks.
 
I highly doubt it'll work like that. I don't think the UPS will like being directed to shutdown in two different places.

2x computers on one UPS will work fine if it has the capacity. You'll need something like Network UPS Tools to do monitoring. The client machine there may not know about battery conditions but it can be ordered to shutdown by the server.
 
its not the ups shutting down its the systems via the monitor software. the ups doesn't really do anything but sit there, the monitor software is what does everything. the issue would be if two systems can monitor the same ups/that the ups can output to two devices at the same time. if it cant the suggested program will work. system 1 monitors ups, sees outage, system 1 tells system 2 its needs to shutdown and then turns itself off. easy.
 
If you're concerned with power outages you might want to consider using laptops for applications that do not require the horsepower of a desktop system, just a thought
 
The PSexec tools look pretty easy to figure out, and most importantly will work cross OS (one is W7 the other W10), I'll test it out when I have time this weekend. That said, I need some stuff from Monoprice so I'm picking up the $2 special for the required cable just to see what happens; I'll let you guys know.

Napoleon: that's not very [H] now is it? The only UPS-worthy system I have that doesn't require "desktop" power is the server, as it does only slightly more than store and sling data for the house, which is why it has a 35w CPU, but the 15 HDDs and raid cards are a little out of a laptop's capability. Everything else worth saving are distributed computing boxxen: more cores, more GHz, more GPUs.
 
I sometimes use a variation of the below, slightly convoluted solution.
The good part is that it's cross platform.

1a. in your UPS' management software, there should be an option to run a script if it's time to shutdown,
1b. make that one a batch script that creates an empty file called - say - 'shuttingdown' on an unprotected network share somewhere (ex. \\10.0.0.100\power"),
optional: create another script that deletes that dummy file and have it run via task scheduler during host shutdown,

2. on the remote computer, create a script which does something like: "if exist \\10.0.0.100\power\shuttingdown "<local shutdown command>", and run it via crontab or task scheduler every, say, 5 minutes (that value would of course depend on your individual typical battery runtime)
 
its not the ups shutting down its the systems via the monitor software. the ups doesn't really do anything but sit there, the monitor software is what does everything. the issue would be if two systems can monitor the same ups/that the ups can output to two devices at the same time. if it cant the suggested program will work. system 1 monitors ups, sees outage, system 1 tells system 2 its needs to shutdown and then turns itself off. easy.
Modern UPSes very much so can be ordered to shut down. The software tells the UPS to kill power to the rest of the ports after the PC goes down.
 
Got the cable and finally tested this out. The final answer is: Yes, you can use it for 2 computers. I don't know if you can use the UPS control software on both at the same time, but I don't need to do that. The USB computer automatically sees the UPS as a battery device (and a power plan is set accordingly to shut down the PC at 90%), and the serial one needs the software to work (naturally). From my tinkering it's also faster than using the psshutdown tool, as I'm not concerned about bridging a power flicker as much as getting the systems shut down as fast as possible while the electricity is going full batshit.

Makes me glad I only bought 1 during the shell shocker sale. Though I still need 3 more...stupid budgeting.
 
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