UPS and network communications.

[maniac]

Hi all,

 

We've recently been woken up to the fact our UPS system doesn't work properly by a power failure over last weekend. The UPS powers stuff fine, but the communication to the servers to trigger them to shutdown does not seem to work at all, nor can I get it to work.

 

We've got an APC 3000va UPS with an old but functional AP9606 web/SNMP management card. I can view the web console and all the UPS details fine, and establish a telnet session to the interface with no problems, so the UPS and the management card are working fine. What I can't do is get the UPS software on the server to talk to the management card properly.

 

The piece of software I've installed is the APC Network Shutdown software. At installation is sucessfully establishes communication with the UPS, and registers itself in the server list with no problems at all. Where I'm getting problems is after installation, the network shutdown software keeps reporting that it can't communicate with the UPS. I've tried everything I can think off to try and get this to work, but it still reports that it can't communicate with the UPS.

 

Any suggestions welcome,

 

Cheers,

 

Mike.

[OutToLunch]

Might be a silly but obvious suggestion but its the sort of thing I'd expect to find nobody had noticed here and never told me when I started... Have you checked that the switch(es) that the UPS/server need working to establish network connection and shutdown do actually continue to function when powered only by UPS? Obviously, no network = no shutdown command arriving...

[maniac]

Yeah, it's all on the same UPS, but it's irrelivant to this problem, as it's the communication before it's even had a problem that it doesn't seem to want to do. Straight away after installing the software it says it can't communicate with the UPS, yet as part of the installation it finds the UPS, authenticates to it and adds its self to the 'server' list inside the UPS.

 

It's puzzling the hell out of me, and APCs website is next to useless for this problem.

 

Mike.

[Ric_]

One assumes that the relevant ports are open?

[maniac]

The machine I'm testing it on doesn't have the firewall enabled, so there shouldn't be a problem with ports. I've tried the software on another 2 different computers with the same results every time, so I'm pretty sure it's something I'm doing wrong, or something that's setup wrong, but I've no idea what, as I've tried everything I can think of to get this working.

 

Mike.