UPS Battery Death

Yesterday my APC Back-UPS XS 800 started beeping like mad and turned on the 'Replace Battery' light. "Great!" I thought, "How much is this going to cost me?"

Like the good little consumer I am, I searched the APC site to see what it would cost for a new battery. $90!? Wow. When I purchased the unit 3 years ago, if I remember correctly, it was about $130 on sale. It's not worth replacing the battery at 3/4 the cost of a new unit which is probably more efficient anyway. APC has a little 5 point 'document' that tells you why to use only APC batteries is their units. The only point that has any real weight is the "Voids APC's Equipment Protection Policy". This unit is 3 years old, and the protection is probably out of date anyway. Moreover, I can't find my original receipt for the unit. Still, I'm not going to pay $90 for a battery. ( Pair of batteries really, but more on this later. )

I remember driving down the street some time ago and seeing a sign in a storefront that reads "We do UPS batteries". Considering the store was called Battery emporium or somesuch, it may be worth a try. "What will it cost to replace this?" Quickly the clerk responded, "about $45". They have done this before. "Let's do it"

It turns out the battery for this UPS is just two standard 12v 7.2Ah sealed Lead-Acid batteries with a bracket in between them to keep them apart and to allow space for the connectors. Nothing fancy or proprietary about it except, maybe, the cable connecting the batteries to the UPS.

The clerk cut off the APC label, disconnected the wires, checked a couple numbers and went to the back. He returned with two new batteries, connected them to the bracket, and used good-ol duct tape to hold the batteries together. Some quick connectivity tests, and $48 later I was out of there. That was easy.

Now that the battery is good, I need to reset the battery date on the UPS. In unix, the tool to do this is called 'apcupsd'. I looked around and found it in the opensolaris contib package repository. I tried it, but it kept coredumping on me. No biggie, I just compiled from scratch. I may look into the core dumps later, but for the moment I can't be bothered.

The only thing left to do is to reset the battery date in the UPS. Not difficult.

# apctest
-> Set battery date

and set the date. Done for now.

Now I need to look into the coredumps or make my own package. I really don't like 'make install' putting things on my system.

Onward.

A Sysadmin Workstation

I have been thinking about getting a new workstation for some time now. I want a rig that I can pound on, use for Virutalization, and just plain play with little fear of breaking it. I'm a sysadmin and could care less about graphics performance. I use fluxbox and mutt and xterm for the most part. Surfing is done by Firefox. My requirements were, lots of Memory, lots of 'guts', and not lots of money. I looked around and decided to build my own.

After some minor research, I went down to my local computer store and purchased all the parts. Memory Express has a free service called 'quickmount'. If you purchase all the parts, they will mount your CPU, and memory to the motherboard and update the BIOS if required. It's a nice little service, and this time is saved me much trouble. It turns out the motherboard I was originally given was defective. This little service cost me an hour ( with mobo replacement and the minor paperwork involved) and saved me much headache. Good on them.

Okay enough preamble. Here is my hardware:

ASUS M4A78-E Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Quad-Core Black Edition 3.2GHz
Corsair 4GB XMS2-8500CS TWIN2X Dual Channel DDR2 Kit (x2, so 8GB total )
ANTEC New Solutions Series NSK6580 Super Mid Tower w/ EarthWatts 430W
Seagate 500GB Barracuda 7200.12 SATAII ( x2, for mirroring. see more below. )
and a monitor, keyboard and mouse I had laying around.

Assembly
I enjoyed assembling this rig. The case is for the most part will layed out. The only exception is the location of the main power connector to the motherboard. The removable 3.5" HD rack is a little too close to the motherboard, so I needed to put my harddrives at the bottom of the rack instead of at the top as I would have liked. No functional deficiency though.

Setup
For the record, I hate onboard video, it just eats system memory. Luckilly this motherboard has some fancy video 'sideport' memory. I'm not sure what the real purpose of it is ( I read it is used for buffering some Crossfire stuff, but I can't remember where). In the BIOS there is an option to turn off using system memory for video, and just use the sideport memory for it. I first tried to just set the Internal Graphics Mode option to Sideport, but that failed as I forgot to also select the Primary Video Controller option to Internal. Now that I have, everything works fine for me.

I have 1066MHz memory for this computer. But to my surprise the Motherboard defaults to 800MHz when all slots are populated. Hmm... The processor documentation says it fully supports it, but the motherboard defaults to 800MHz for 'stability'. I am currently running memtest86+ in both configurations to see what happens.

Operating System
Open Solaris.
Yup, I'm a *nix guy. Any unix-like operation system works for me. I want to use Open Solaris (OS) for tools I get out of the box, like ZFS, zones and dtrace. I have two 500GB harddrives so I can mirror then using ZFS. I will be doing some testing for performance. There are some different SATA drive access options in the BIOS (namely IDE or AHCI). We'll see what happens.

More to come as it becomes available.