Nut upsuser - Jan 2010 - MGE Ellipse 500 USB power failure problem

Hello,

I have an MGE Ellipse 500 UPS for about 8 years, connected to a local 
OpenBSD server through usb, running nut-2.2.1. I used to occasionally drain 
the UPS battery to see if the local server was shutting down cleanly my desktop
PC
and it was working OK.

Suddenly, there was a power failure last week, the UPS was serving the two
PCs (the server and the client) for 30 secs and then it went off,
cutting off the two machines unexpectedly. There weren't any messages in
syslog (all events are logged my upsmon) neither on the server side nor on
the client's side.

Today, I tried to reproduce this outtage to figure out what happens.

- Plugging off the UPS for ~5 secs, there were syslog messages about going
  on battery and going back online.

- Plugging off the UPS in order for the server to force a clean shutdown,
  the UPS works for about 30 secs and the cuts off the two machines like
  the incident last week. Nothing is logged to syslog. After booting the
  two machines again, UPS battery level is at 86% which tells me that it
  didn't drain as I have read that it takes time to reach its full capacity
  again.

- No overload/failure indications have been reported.

I can only assume that there's something irreasonable with the values from
my upsmon.conf, intervals have been tweaked in order to avoid stall
problems. If the UPS is stall the NOTIFYCMD restarts upsdrvctl, upsd,
upsmon.

My upsmon.conf follows :

RUN_AS_USER _ups 
MONITOR myups at localhost 1 admin admin master
MINSUPPLIES 1
SHUTDOWNCMD "/sbin/shutdown -h +0"
NOTIFYCMD /usr/local/bin/restart_nut_suite
POLLFREQ 5 
POLLFREQALERT 5
HOSTSYNC 15
DEADTIME 20 
POWERDOWNFLAG /etc/killpower
NOTIFYFLAG ONLINE       SYSLOG
NOTIFYFLAG ONBATT       SYSLOG
NOTIFYFLAG LOWBATT      SYSLOG
NOTIFYFLAG FSD  SYSLOG
NOTIFYFLAG COMMOK       SYSLOG
NOTIFYFLAG COMMBAD      SYSLOG+EXEC
NOTIFYFLAG SHUTDOWN     SYSLOG
NOTIFYFLAG REPLBATT     SYSLOG
NOTIFYFLAG NOCOMM       SYSLOG+EXEC
NOTIFYFLAG NOPARENT     SYSLOG
RBWARNTIME 43200
NOCOMMWARNTIME 300
FINALDELAY 0


Does anybody have an idea what's going wrong?

Thanks
D.

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On Mon, 4 Jan 2010, Dimitris Mandalidis wrote:
> I have an MGE Ellipse 500 UPS for about 8 years,...
> Suddenly, there was a power failure last week, the UPS was serving 
> the two PCs ... for 30 secs and then it went off,
> Does anybody have an idea what's going wrong?
Hi, When did you last change the batteries in the UPS?
Roger