What's a good affordable UPS?

[Shawn Erickson]

On Dec 27, 2006, at 7:39 AM, Chad Leigh wrote:

>
> On Dec 27, 2006, at 2:29 AM, Hex Star wrote:
>
>> well really all I'm concerned about is my mac being able to  
>> shutdown normally so that there isn't a chance of file system  
>> corruption, I wouldn't leave things like word documents or other  
>> important nature open and just leave for a long time far away from  
>> my mac so in those cases I'd be near my mac so I could shut it  
>> down and save the documents within the time frame given by the  
>> UPS, all other times I typically just leave Firefox open with  
>> gmail, paypal, and the apple store in tabs ... so if I use the  
>> auto ups shutdown feature, since I have firefox set to warn on  
>> closing when there's multiple tabs (sometimes when I stay up too  
>> late I accidentally click the X for the main window and the  
>> warning comes in handy), would the auto shutdown feature force  
>> firefox to close? or would it be better for me to just disable the  
>> warn on closing when there's multiple tabs alert? Er actually does  
>> the UPS execute the shutdown as soon as power is lost or after it  
>> looses a good amount of power? Guess it'd make sense for it to  
>> wait a bit to allow for saving of open documents first...but if it  
>> doesn't would it then just do a normal OS X shutdown? And if so  
>> what does OS X do when trying to shutdown and there's apps open  
>> that don't want to close because of alert dialogs? Does it wait  
>> until the matter is fixed or does it force close the programs  
>> after some time? sounds like this is the UPS for me...now if I can  
>> just figure out how that mentioned event will play out I'll be all  
>> set...thanks alot! :D
>
> I don't have a UPS software installed on my Mac so I do not know  
> how they do a shutdown, but I would expect they would issue a  
> shutdown event, the same as choosing "Shutdown" in the menu or hit  
> the power button and get the shutdown dialog and tell it to  
> shutdown.  In my experience, when that happens, if an app cannot be  
> quit, for example, the app puts up an alert to save documents and  
> the alert does not have a timeout, then the shutdown is cancelled.   
> I think the system waits for 2min or something like that, from my  
> memory, before it cancels.

Mac OS X / Mac hardware understands UPS requests. See the man page  
for pmset.

UPS SPECIFIC ARGUMENTS
      UPS-specific arguments are only valid following the -u option.  
UPS set-settings
      tings also have an on/off value. Use a -1 argument instead of  
percent or
      minutes to turn any of these settings off. If multiple halt  
conditions
      are specified, the system will halt on the first condition that  
occurs in
      a low power situation.

      haltlevel - when draining UPS battery, battery level at which  
to trigger
      an emergency shutdown (value in %)
      haltafter - when draining UPS battery, trigger emergency  
shutdown after
      this long running on UPS power (value in minutes)
      haltremain - when draining UPS battery, trigger emergency  
shutdown when
      this much time remaining on UPS power is estimated (value in  
minutes)

Also note (think added in 10.3.3 timeframe)...

<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh2335.html>

-Shawn