Nut upsuser - Jan 2008 - couple questions about supported UPSes and politics of purchase

a customer of mine needs a UPS capable of supporting a small server in his 
office.  Obviously, nut is a good thing for him for clean shutdown etc. 
especially with the crappy quality power in his office condo.

I wanted to purchase an MGE UPS but it looks like they purchased APC and are now
flogging that product line.  Now, I've never been happy with APC.  I have an
APC
3000 (sans batteries) sitting in the basement.  It worked but, it needs new 
batteries every 24 months and they get expensive.  (Note: if you're in the 
Boston area and you want it, make me a reasonable offer either in cash or 
equipment trade and it's yours.) And I had a little 350 unit for my
wife's
desktop which also ate batteries.  Contrast to the Belkin 1100 units I have 
running a couple servers and some switches in the basement.  They've worked 
really well with decent battery life.  I might even get brave enough to connect 
NUT to them this weekend.  :-)

so what's up with the MGE/APC mash up?

-- 
Speech-recognition in use.  It makes mistakes, I correct some.

Hi Eric,

2008/1/18, Eric S. Johansson <esj at harvee.org>:
> a customer of mine needs a UPS capable of supporting a small server in his
> office.  Obviously, nut is a good thing for him for clean shutdown etc.
> especially with the crappy quality power in his office condo.
>
> I wanted to purchase an MGE UPS but it looks like they purchased APC and
are now
> flogging that product line.  Now, I've never been happy with APC.  I
have an APC
> 3000 (sans batteries) sitting in the basement.  It worked but, it needs new
> batteries every 24 months and they get expensive.  (Note: if you're in
the
> Boston area and you want it, make me a reasonable offer either in cash or
> equipment trade and it's yours.) And I had a little 350 unit for my
wife's
> desktop which also ate batteries.  Contrast to the Belkin 1100 units I have
> running a couple servers and some switches in the basement.  They've
worked
> really well with decent battery life.  I might even get brave enough to
connect
> NUT to them this weekend.  :-)
>
> so what's up with the MGE/APC mash up?
You might have missed that the single phase MGE productss have been
sold to Eaton (Powerware's mother firm), and is now known as MGE
Office Protection Systems.

And MGE Office Protection Systems is the new NUT sponsor, as the NUT
website now reflects.
And most of all, this gives me even more time to work on NUT (about 3
times more than before!).

I hope this answers your question.
Best regards,
Arnaud
-- 
Linux / Unix Expert R&D - MGE Office Protection Systems -
http://www.mgeops.com
Network UPS Tools (NUT) Project Leader - http://www.networkupstools.org/
Debian Developer - http://people.debian.org/~aquette/
Free Software Developer - http://arnaud.quette.free.fr/

On Jan 18, 2008 1:47 PM, Eric S. Johansson <esj at harvee.org>
wrote:
> a customer of mine needs a UPS capable of supporting a small server in his
> office.  Obviously, nut is a good thing for him for clean shutdown etc.
> especially with the crappy quality power in his office condo.
>
> I wanted to purchase an MGE UPS but it looks like they purchased APC and
are now
> flogging that product line.  Now, I've never been happy with APC.  I
have an APC
> 3000 (sans batteries) sitting in the basement.  It worked but, it needs new
> batteries every 24 months and they get expensive.  (Note: if you're in
the
> Boston area and you want it, make me a reasonable offer either in cash or
> equipment trade and it's yours.) And I had a little 350 unit for my
wife's
> desktop which also ate batteries.  Contrast to the Belkin 1100 units I have
> running a couple servers and some switches in the basement.  They've
worked
> really well with decent battery life.  I might even get brave enough to
connect
> NUT to them this weekend.  :-)
I've got a pair of SOHO type units.  A little 650 VA Belkin unit,
that's ok (nothing special, but at that price I didn't expect anything
else) and an MGE Ellipse unit.  The MGE is a better unit, but the
internal fan is starting to fail (it sounds like dust-related
problems), I now have to work out if it's worth trying to/is possible
to replace the fan, or just replace the unit with one with out a fan.

Despite that, I'd still buy MGE-OPS over Belkin.  The units seem
better built and mine has been more reliable than my Belkin.  The fact
that they support open source is a major advantage IMO (yes, I'm
biased, have you tried the Belkin Bulldog software under Linux?).

Either way, you'll need to replace the batteries every few years.
Over time they degrade and stop holding any meaningful charge.  After
about 3-4 years my Belkin batteries only held about 2 seconds of
runtime (as I discovered when the power went out, the Belkin beeped
once and died).

-- 
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Rob MacGregor
      Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he
        doesn't become a monster.                  Friedrich Nietzsche