Right now I'm currently protecting my workstation with an APC 1550va UPS. From what I've read, it can be controlled by apcupsd. However, being unfamiliar with this software I'm wondering if there's a way to set it up so that, rather than waiting xx minutes to start the power down of everything, that it instead waits until there's only 5 minutes of runtime left, or 20% of battery, either one. The idea is, I have a NAS also connected to the UPS, and I want to be able to keep things running as long as possible before it shuts everything down. The NAS is a Qnap, so I don't think there's any way to control when that powers off, but the workstation is obviously Kubuntu, so that one I can control and decide when it should go down. But I'm wanting max runtime if possible, and I'm not sure if that's configurable or not. I sure don't want it switching me off as soon as there's a power outage or power flutter. That'd suck given what I do. Having enough advanced warning will help me a ton. And yes, I realize that's hard on the batteries, but I'd rather replace batteries more often than risk losing important data.
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Have you connected it to your Kubuntu system and then gone to your power management settings and tweaked things there?
I have a small-ish Cyberpower UPS that though there is software that they have available, I just use the system power management settings to do the shutdown when the battery gets to 5% or three minutes after the screen shuts (idle) off if at 10% or less. , though I am not using it with any external device like a NAS. it shows up in the Systray as a battery in the 'Battery and Brightness' applet there.
You can connect the UPS to the Qnap, and it is supposed to support auto shutdown, though it is probably model specific.
https://www.qnap.com/en-us/support/con_show.php?cid=11
or i imagine it would not be overly difficult to find or create a script or command string that connects to the nas, and tells it to shut down, and have that run via Plasma's power management module when the desired level is hit. -
Hmm, that sounds like some interesting ideas. I'll have to explore those.Comment
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I use apcupsd. I have it on a main system and then the other portions I have set to shut down if need be on a power outage.
The biggest issue I ever had was making sure I had the apcupsd.conf file set correctly for the type it was. Since most APC now are USB it was relatively straight forward.
Once apcupsd was installed, apcupsd.conf is located in /etc/apcupsd/.
I can say, at least for me, the files there are fairly straight self explanatory and the comments in the apcupsd.conf file and the apccontrol file give good understanding to how it functions.Comment
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Cool, sounds good to me. Plus, I never thought of controlling apcupsd through the power management settings. For some reason my brain kept thinking it was independently controlled. But if it can be managed through power management, that's flat out perfect. The bridging to the Qnap will be the only challenge. But I think I can find ways to solve that too.
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FYI, as a followup, I got the UPS software and monitoring up, and all is good. It just took me a little bit to get around to actually activating it. ^_^;; Also, FYI, after some research, I decided to just connect my desktop and not worry about the UPS. Apparently, yes, I can tie them both in at the same time, but the Qnap is so gawd awful slow at shutting down it's kinda pointless to tie it in as the UPS would power off before it'd shut down. 
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I'm using Cyber Power UPS's not APC, but I find it had to believe that your UPS can't stay alive long enough for your NAS to shutdown. Does your UPS actually shut itself off? what's the point of that? My UPSs don't shut themselves off, they send a shutdown signal to the computers, then beep in an annoying fashion until the power comes back on.Comment
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Yeah, my APC UPS actually shuts down. It'll send the shutdown command to the PC first, and then 5 minutes later, shut down or not, the UPS shuts down. It then doesn't power on until after power has been restored for I think at least 5 minutes or more.Comment
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