[ghporter]

I'm trying to get all of my various computers to be "aware" of UPS status so they can gracefully handle power bumps and outages. I thought my best bet was to run apcupsd on one networked machine and the NIS client on everything else. But Monterey and Sonoma don't offer a way to configure the client (no NIS anything), and the latest (not very recent) version of apcupsd isn't supported by either of those OS versions.

While most of the different machines are on independent UPS devices, not all of them are. It's not really practical for me to do that. For example, I have two and sometimes three laptops with external backup drives that are all powered from one UPS - I need to tell those laptops to unmount their drives when the UPS switches to battery, but only one laptop can connect to the UPS status port.

If there is something out there for Macs, my google-fu is extremely weak, because I haven't seen a hint of it.

If it makes a difference, all the UPS devices are APC brand units. Any leads, direction, advice?

[reader50]

I don't have any answers on the main question.

On the laptops, any way to power the backup drives using a spare USB port? Notebooks will flush all caches to disk before going to sleep, and they go to sleep automatically if the battery runs low. So the UPS powers the laptop(s), they power their external drives in turn, and you never get data loss.

[ghporter]

Sadly, these external drives need something like 12V - they are desktop drive enclosures (because I like to over-engineer things like this).

One thing I thought up was some kind of network signaling. Some sort of message that goes out when the UPS-signaled computer is told the UPS is on battery, and that would trigger a script on the laptops to unmount their external drives. I know there’s a way to send such messages, but I just don’t know how to ask for the right thing.

I recall LONG ago lots of stuff going on about having an Ethernet server send commands and alerts to client machines, but nowadays if you Google for “network message” you get hits for a zillion IM apps…

I fixed one issue that really bugged me: the newer, much larger computer has a 300W power supply, while the older one is essentially a sort of wimpy laptop in a cigar box, and its power supply is only 90W. Having the small machine on the same UPS as all the network stuff - broadband modem, access points, switches, etc. - wasn’t an issue. But having a 300W draw on the same UPS seemed like it would cut the run time of the UPS a LOT. I was moving stuff around and located a 600VA UPS that I’d forgotten about. Still good, and plenty of capacity for the new machine, especially all by itself. So the new machine is on that UPS, network and old machine on the other.