APC AP9605 PowerNet SNMP Card
In the theme of upgrades, I also purchased two APC SmartUPS1000 units from refurbUPS.com. Now, I know that a lot of people are perfectly happy with serial connectivity. And it has its positives. But I’m running 2-3 servers per UPS, older servers, wanted to be able to monitor the UPSs, and perhaps control server shutdown, over the network.. So, I found that refurbUPS.com also sells SNMP management cards for them. They sell a refurbished AP9605 – it’s an old 10BaseT PowerNet SNMP-only card (with telnet management). Seemed good, and the price of $15 was right.
They showed up, but I couldn’t find much about them online, let alone anything useful.
After a phone call to APC, I managed to get the user’s manual emailed to me. The few instructions I found online were totally wrong.
The general setup goes like this:
- Connect network cable to card.
- Connect serial cable between a computer and the UPS’s serial port.
- Get a terminal emulator, like minicom. Speed is 2400bps.
- connect and press enter. You’ll be asked for a username and password. Use “apc” for both.
- 5) Setup the network – IP, mask, gateway, etc.
- Ready-to-go!
I also have some information about the card on my wiki at: AP9605.
Thanks, Jason – he most useful information I’ve found so far. Once the APC9605 is accessible on the network, what software did you use to monitor the UPS and shutdown the servers?
John
John,
Personally, I used APCupsd, mainly because I have that working for some of my older serial-based UPSs. I used its’ SNMP check function, which does rely on the network being up. The other common *nix program is NUT, though it looks like the current version has only experimental support for SNMP.
At this point, I’ve never actually tested the shutdown. My UPSs will run for 23-29 minutes, and the only time I’ve had a power outage longer than that (since I’ve had these UPSs), I was on-site and able to manually shut down the machines (tree down, I knew it would be a long outage).
I also monitor over SNMP with Nagios.
-Jason