RE: Weak Battery Options -- MIDRANGE-L

The UPS integration with i5/OS leaves a lot to be desired anyway.

You can't even attach a network enabled UPS, there's no SNMP UPS
support.

And even with the serial attachement, you can't get much information out
of the UPS. We're mostly using Powerware 9125 UPSes with the System i
deployed to our customers. They can only be attached to a System i
machine using a relay card (making it impossible to attach other IT
systems to the UPS) - when attaching the UPS with a Web/SNMP card, I can
get all the information with a web browser, and it works out of the box
with both Linux und Windows machines.

Of course, this isn't a problem for all those big System i customers IBM
does care about - it's the Small Businesses without a datacenter that
are stuck with no real solution.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces+l.beeler=dataline.ch@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces+l.beeler=dataline.ch@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Pete Helgren
Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2007 10:23 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Weak Battery Options

Thanks Larry. I was leaning that way but it is rather peculiar that IBM

doesn't have some kind of system value to deal with the weak UPS battery

condition. The equivalent being the cache battery on the RAID
controller. IBM doesn't automatically degrade the disk performance,
they first give you a heads up and later degrade the disks when they
calculate that its time to replace the battery. It would be nice if IBM

had a setting that gave you the option of issuing a warning message on
the weak battery condition and a time frame of up to 30 seconds of
outage before shutting down the system on a loss of power with weak
batteries. Just assuming that the weak batteries aren't enough to
handle even the most transitory of power flickers seems an bit extreme.

Having JUST replaced my cache batteries last week, I am suffering from
battery fatigue I guess. I'll trundle down to my favorite battery place

tomorrow and pick up some new ones....hopefully before Rocky Mountain
Power sends me a "flicker" again. Once I take care of that I WILL take
a look at a program to be more reasonable about when to shut down the
system.

Pete

Larry Bolhuis wrote:

The short term solution is to pull the cable from the UPS to the 270.

course this way if there is a real power outage you run until those

weak

old batteries area actually dead and then 'thud'.

Better would be a program handing the power rather than IBMs build in
code. This way you can do whatever you want. Set a message queue

other

than QSYSOPR (something like QUPSMSGQ for example) .and then set a

break

handling program on queue. The program then does what YOU want it to

do.

Best of course is new batteries. But you knew that. :-)

- Larry

Pete Helgren wrote:

It is set for 300 on this 270. I *think* that means that it should

wait

for 5 minutes before beginning the shutdown but it appears that when

detects a "weak battery condition" then it ignores the value and just

shuts down on its own.

Pete

Lukas Beeler wrote:

What's your System Value QUPSDLYTIM set to?

It should _NEVER_ be on *CALC with "normal" Systems. I usually have

set

it to 300.

*CALC is only used for Systems with an internal UPS. Those no longer
exist. And the 270 didn't have an internal UPS.