[Zoom]

I picked up a 650VA APC Back-UPS Pro for $15 at a fire sale. It's worth $15 just to have the backup power, but I'd like to connect it to my Mac, too, if possible.

It has a serial cable interface, no USB. My G4/Sawtooth has no serial input (PC serial, not ADB). Is there such thing as a USB-to-serial connector?

Will I need management software to make this work? If so, is it freely downloadable?

I found this support page at APC, and according to this, I think I'm SOL.

But I know that support pages are often conservative and don't tell the whole story. Has anyone else gotten this setup to work? I would mainly like for some software to shut down my Mac when the battery is about to give up because I leave my machine on all the time.

[rocky2]

One way to do this is get hold of an AP9606 Web/SNMP management card if your APC model has a slot for this. I found two in a junk bin for $5 each! The only problem was that somebody had set an unknown non-default IP address and I had to use a modem protocol from a serial port on a PC to reset the card defaults. After that the connection to a Mac via a LAN and setup was easy using the free APC software download for Macs. These cards can be found on ebay for a few bucks too.
Another way that I tried and gave me endless trouble was to use a USB-serial cable to make the physical connection and then setup a new seria port in the Network I/F settings of OS X. I had trouble because my cable used a Prolific 2303 chipset to perform the USB-serial conversion and the OS X drivers provided by the maker were broken by 10.2.6. The OSXHints website had a thread on this back in September 2003 (http://www.macosxhints.com/art
icle.php?story=200309231754060). I got the cable working with a patch to the Apple USB driver code provided by iDG but then 10.3 broke the patched driver again and by this time I had the AP9606 working. If you do go the cable route, buy one with known support in OS X. There are quite a few that people have used successfully to connect serial PDAs, etc.

Good luck