

Why is APC So Lame? - gherlein
http://blog.herlein.com/2010/10/why-is-apc-so-lame/

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arethuza
I've had a lot of respect for the build quality of APC power supplies since an
incident where I almost had a fairly large one dropped on me.

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synx508
I have never had a good experience with APC UPSs, my favourite anti-feature is
the self-test that ends with power to the load being interrupted. The "shuts
off instantly when cable connected" anti-feature bit a colleague of mine
recently.

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Corrado
We installed a large, rack mounted unit to power our servers but for some
reason they were going down, usually after hours. It took us 2 weeks to figure
out that the UPS was the reason the machines were rebooting randomly. I never
in my wildest dreams would think that the UPS would be the cause; they are
supposed to prevent things like this!

Apparently the APC model that we had installed wasn't live failover (or
whatever) and when the batteries went "bad" it just killed the power to
everything. And thanks to the weird "serial" cables and non-Linux friendliness
of APC we never got the monitoring working correctly so we weren't warned
about it ahead of time.

Instead of purchasing new batteries for the APC we got a TrippLite unit
installed with no problems. It has a standard USB cable and the software works
great with Linux & Windows. I even got a used TrippLite unit off of eBay for
my office and they sent me rack mounting hardware for free! I love TrippLite
and will never again even pause to think about APC.

tl;dr APC screwed us so we switched to TrippLite and have had no problems.

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lutorm
I've had maybe 8 APC units and one did develop the problem you just mentioned
of cutting out when the battery was dead even though the power was still on.

However, I've never had one catch fire while on battery power unlike the first
and last TrippLite I tried...

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chmike
I have an APC ups for my two via Ubuntu servers, adsl, switch, etc for two
years now and it works perfectly. I had many problems before because there
where power drops and the via servers behaved abnormally after that. Now
everything is very stable. We had a one hour power cut this summer (very
exceptionnal) and everything worked perfectly. Both servers shutdown
automatically after 30min, though they could hold 1hour (I tested). They
automatically rebooted when the current was back.It has USB plug and looks
like a big fat multiplug connector. It wasn't very expensive. I had one of
another make before and it was sh*.

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linker3000
I'm geting a database error trying to read the article - maybe the server
power has failed?

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wanderr
Ha, I assumed this was going to be an article complaining about Alternative
PHP Cache, not the UPS company, and I was going to make a joke about how
perhaps with caching the servers would have been able to handle the load.

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chopsueyar
Me too, I just installed an nginx / php-fpm server, and thought this was a
relevant and timely article.

The nginx/php-fpm server does have a Cyberpower UPS, so I guess it is kind of
relevant.

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wanderr
Interestingly, we will be doing that soon as well. Care to share your
experiences?

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wccrawford
I've had about a dozen APCs in my home over the years. I've also had a handful
of other UPSs from other companies. The APCs have always been the most
reliable and lasted the longest.

We also use them for our computers and racks at work. Again, the APCs have
always been the best.

Of course, they're also more expensive... So I guess it's a tradeoff. I'm
particularly leery of unknown brands since one of those started sparking and I
was worried it would kill me or burn the house down. I doubt I'll buy anything
except the best names from now on.

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zdw
APC is the Cisco/IBM/Microsoft of UPS's - nobody got fired for buying one.

That said, you can get the same quality for cheaper, but UPS's have a network
effect - you don't want to have to install multiple shutdown software versions
that work in different ways on all your equipment.

Also there's a lot of equipment out there (RAID frames, etc) that will only
speak the APC protocol over a DB-9 serial link, unfortunately...

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tallanvor
I've never had any problems with APC units, and I definitely recommend them
over cheaper brands to others. I remember one incident where a lightning
strike took out half the components in the unit. It couldn't keep the servers
powered for that, but at least none of them were damaged, and the APC itself
was back to work once the damaged components were replaced.

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smackfu
I am also baffled by the weird serial to USB cable my UPS came with. You're
selling a product that is basically 90% battery and 10% smarts, and they don't
seem to spend any money on the smarts.

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wnoise
> how can APC, the market leader, be so overwhelmingly lame in this day and
> age?

Precisely because they are the market leader.

