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I run an APC Smart UPS 750 in my home lab environment and have been doing so for a number of years now. The reason for this is that quality of my inner city London electricity feed is prone to fluctuate, this isn’t helped by my home being located in a live-work block where spikes in power is common due to what I assume is the fluctuating power requirements by the businesses throughout the day.
I have found my APC Smart UPS 750 to be a reliable little unit with it sitting under my desk successfully protecting my servers from any spikes, brown-outs or poor power quality. The other night I was woken at 3:15am by an alarm noise coming from my office, which hosts my servers and UPS. Upon inspection there was a red light on the front indicating that the battery in the UPS was in the throes of failing. Luckily the audible alarm only lasted 60 seconds though when later reading the owners manual found out that it re-occurs every 5 hours until the battery is replaced. Sure enough the alarm sounded again at 8:15am.
Obviously this wasn’t desirable for me as I would no doubt be woken the following night again with the alarm going off.
So how to turn this audible warning off? This isn’t possible from the actual UPS unit itself so to disable the audible warning you have to venture into APC PowerPath software which connects to the Smart UPS 750. By entering the ‘Device Properties’, checking the ‘Show advanced items’ and then selecting ‘Power Parameters’ you will see a setting entitled ‘Audible Warning’. From the drop down list box select ‘Never’ (the default setting is ‘On Battery’) meaning that the audible alarm won’t sound.
This means that I will be able to sleep throughout the night until my replacement APC UPS battery is delivered and installed.
helpfull. thanks 🙂
Thanks for giving just enough information to lead someone to some false sense of hope that what you wrote about above is actually possible, and not enough information to actually help them in doing what so. There are no links to this “powerpath” software, and when searching APC’s site this software does not exist.
Try the APC PowerChute software, which can still be downloaded from here: http://www.apc.com/tools/download/index.cfm
It’s been a while since I’ve used it, though that may do the trick for you
PawelLies what did you do throw away the software discs that came with your APC UPS?
Thanks Simon your advice helped tremendously for me on my APC UPS-1000. My alarm was continuously going off and I thought there was no hope until I replaced the battery or something. This gives me peace and quiet.
On a Mac, download http://www.apcupsd.org/
It’s not easy to use, but in the documentation, you will see that there is a software call apctest
Open a terminal, type “sudo apctest”, you will have access to a configuration menu that allow you to change the alarm behavior.
Before running apctest, you may have to kill the apcupsd deamon. To do so: in a terminal, ps -A | grep apcupsd
then find the process with the apcupsd-start (let say it is 51)
then enter: sudo kill 51 (or whatever process id you end up with for apcupsd)
What a bunch of winers, if you want it off pop the hood and cut it loose or put some Scotch 33 over the horn like us electricians did, or u could use the software. Next thing you know you will want it to wipe your bum!
I only tried this on commercial-quality UPS systems like the Smart-UPS. Unlike el cheapo systems that expect to run only a few minutes as your PC shuts down, these have fans that can keep the UPS cool indefinitely.
Benoit,
Just wanted to say thank you so much. There was nothing really available that I saw for Mac to turn off the alarm beeping. This worked wonders!
Want to thank Benoit for this information, it’s about the only place I could find a way to disable beeping without having Windows.
Also I figured I’d add to it in case someone else has the same needs.
You can’t just run “sudo apctest”, you need to go into the directory where it’s located:
“cd /usr/local/sbin” (without quotes) then run it with “sudo ./apctest”