“Multiple PC's - Battery Backup - APC’s Network Shutdown Software”

By Ron Stultz

 13 March 2007

 Summary: a UPS is going to keep your attached personal computers (PC's) alive during any power drop out but if power goes out for some extended period of time, the battery in the UPS is eventually going to drain and thus must have some way to command all attached to shut down gracefully. This is done buy UPS optional hardware and software.

Background:

In 2 other parts on computer system battery backup, I described how I had selected and procured an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for my 3 tower PC’s local area network (LAN) and my experiences with APC Business Standard Edition signaling software. In summary of the 2 other battery backup sections, after lots of research, I bought an APC SAV 1500 Smart UPS only to find that it would not command all 3 of my tower PC’s to shutdown gracefully at a “power” event right out of the box, using APC’s Business Standard Edition software.  

According to APC, the only way the 1500 can command multiple computers to gracefully shutdown at power event was to procure either a serial port expander smart card or an Ethernet-based smart card that would plug into my 1500. 

In my case, rightly or wrongly, I bought a used APC Ethernet-based card off of eBay.