User's Manual UPS control system

and have never been disappointed. The owner of the place also
is very good on technical issues, so if you have questions on their
products, he can get as technical as you need to go.
Regards,
--Carl
Here is a link to the APC Battery Store.
Frequently-Asked Questions
See the bugs section of this document for a list of known bugs and solutions.
Q: Why all the craziness with custom serial cables?
A: It was nothing more nor less than a form of customer control. For a
long time APC wanted to keep other people from talking to its UPSes
so it could lock out potential competition for its PowerChute software.
Scrambling the leads on its serial cables was a cheap way to accomplish
this – in fact, they tended to be wired so that if you tried a straight-
through cable, opening a serial link to the UPS would be interpreted
as a shutdown command!
(Hardware companies often think like this – they lock up interfaces by
instinct, cornering a small market rather than growing a bigger one.
It’s fundamentally stupid and self-defeating, but it’s the kind of stupid
that tends to sound good at an executive meeting.)
Fortunately, APC has lost a lot of this attitude since about 2000; nowa-
days they even release technical information to the apcupsd maintain-
ers.
Q: What UPS brands does apcupsd support?
A: Currently apcupsd supports only APC UPSes. However, some com-
panies such as Hewlett Packard put their own brand name on APC
manufactured UPSes. Thus even if you do not have an APC branded
UPS, it may work with apcupsd. You will need to know the corre-
sponding APC model number. apcupsd supports all the popular APC
models. See the installation and configurations sections of this docu-
ment for more details.
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