Eaton UPS

[Renegade605]

Hey all, 

 

Looking at buying an Eaton UPS in a couple weeks (settled on the 5PX series). I've found a lot of people online saying the Network M2 card is a must have, but for an extra 50% cost I'm not so sure. 

 

Does anyone have experience with these who can say specifically what, if anything, the network interface can offer that serial communication cannot? 

 

Also, the units have a USB port and a classic RS232 serial port, does anyone know if I can use both simultaneously so two physical servers can talk to the UPS at the same time (or alternately)?

 

Servers are running Unraid and I'm comfortable writing bash scripts to query information from the unit and act on its responses when appropriate. 

[Needfuldoer]

If you want multiple servers to communicate with the UPS, you can run NUT (Network UPS Tools). One PC/server/Pi/etc connects to the serial port on the UPS, and your other devices talk to NUT over the network for their monitoring.

 

Here's a list of Eaton UPSes it supports.

 

 

[Renegade605]

Thanks! Looks like that supports everything I need. The only concern it doesn't alleviate for me is redundancy (ie. The one server connected via serial is down and the other won't know that it should shut down.)

 

But I'll play around with it once I have a physical UPS on hand. Regardless, doesn't look like buying the network card bundled is any cheaper than buying it later.