Monday, September 14, 2009
Disabling the alarm on APC UPSes
You know what I mean. What were they thinking? Here’s a helpful explanation by an APC employee:
I understand your concern with not wanting to be woken up at 2am to be alerted that power has gone out in your residence. I use the software at home to disable the audible tone as well, however, I think taking a look at it from a different approach may be ideal. Is the UPS your source of power for your alarm clock in the morning? What would occur if you were to have to wake up at a specific time during the week, and your alarm clock, which is not powered by your UPS, powers off due to a blackout, even if it is momentary? I think it would be ideal in this scenario that the UPS wakes you to notify you of a power failure. That would allow you to possibly find an alternate source of power for the alarm clock, or, if power is to be restored within a reasonable period of time, to reset your clock so that you wake up on time.
Right. That’s why. That horrible shriek is meant to wake you up. If, like all real people, you have an alarm clock that runs on batteries and prefer a full night’s sleep, it turns out that you can disable it. This works on most common APC UPS models with the USB cable. Windows users should install APC’s PowerChute software. It apparently has an option somewhere to turn it off. On Linux, the apcupsd package will do it for you (make sure to plugin the USB cable first):
Step 1
Install apcupsd. Edit /etc/apcupsd.conf as root and set the following options:
UPSCABLE usb UPSTYPE usb DEVICE
Step 2
Run sudo apctest (or via su if your distribution prefers it). You should see output like this:
$ sudo apctest 2009-09-14 15:57:50 apctest 3.14.4 (18 May 2008) debian Checking configuration ... Attached to driver: usb sharenet.type = DISABLE cable.type = USB_CABLE You are using a USB cable type, so I'm entering USB test mode mode.type = USB_UPS Setting up the port ... Hello, this is the apcupsd Cable Test program. This part of apctest is for testing USB UPSes. Getting UPS capabilities...SUCCESS Please select the function you want to perform. 1) Test kill UPS power 2) Perform self-test 3) Read last self-test result 4) Change battery date 5) View battery date 6) View manufacturing date 7) Set alarm behavior 8) Set sensitivity 9) Set low transfer voltage 10) Set high transfer voltage 11) Quit Select function number: 7 Current alarm setting: ENABLED Press... E to Enable alarms D to Disable alarms Q to Quit with no changes Your choice: Select function: d New alarm setting: DISABLED 1) Test kill UPS power 2) Perform self-test 3) Read last self-test result 4) Change battery date 5) View battery date 6) View manufacturing date 7) Set alarm behavior 8) Set sensitivity 9) Set low transfer voltage 10) Set high transfer voltage 11) Quit Select function number: 11 2009-09-14 15:58:22 End apctest.
Congratulations! That shriek is gone forever! May you have a good, long night’s sleep.
You may now uninstall apcupsd. Keeping it around without a UPS attached will do weird things to the battery status report on a laptop.
Thejesh GN — Sep 18, 2009 2:56:59 PM — # ↩
Cool. I am going to do it this weekend.
BTW “jace:post=2009/09/14/disabling-the-alarm-on-apc-upses” is too big to tag. Can you make it something like jace:post=post_number
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Sep 18, 2009 10:34:26 PM — # ↩
That’ll imply revealing a database id or creating another id just for this. Maybe I can club that with a short url mechanism. Hmm.
Thejesh GN — Sep 18, 2009 3:01:12 PM — # ↩
Who ate my comment?
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Sep 18, 2009 10:35:02 PM — # ↩
It was held for moderation. I get a ton of spam for not having captcha. You should be able to post unmoderated now.