Why is APC So Lame? | Hacker News Reader

Why is APC So Lame?

blog.herlein.com

26 pointsgherlein18 comments

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.

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.

My experience is the same. You would think that their large capacity 'enterprise' products would at least be somewhat more reliable than the under-desk units, but we had nothing but trouble with the Symmetras we installed a few years back. That plus the outageous way the products are designed to maximize future APC revenue in spares and replacements rather than maximize uptime caused me to put in place a new "no more money to APC" rule at work this year.

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.

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...

You test your UPS with a live machine connected ? Seriously ?

You misunderstand the meaning of test, the UPS tests itself periodically as part of its normal operation. In this case, if it fails the test it takes your servers with it.

I imagine the test is to ensure the accuracy of the battery runtime prediction, it transfers your load off line power and onto the inverter & batteries. Unfortunately something happens that causes the UPS to shut down or pause rather than immediately switch back to line power. Often the only evidence is that your servers power-cycled unexpectedly, sometimes the UPS actually switches off entirely during the test, however.

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*.

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

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.

The story is about the UPS company, not the caching software.

Google's cached version is here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

Precisely because they are the market leader.

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