California in 2023 so far has been receiving much-needed rainfall. I want to be sensitive to the devastation it has caused in many parts of the state, I’m fortunate to be in an area where there is no immediate risk, choosing to stay indoors and catch up with personal hobbies..feels like another shelter in place.
Gusty winds accompanied by rain can have severe impact on electrical infrastructure above and below ground in our cities. There could be accidents on electric poles or emergency power shut offs by utility providers. Our home lights start to flicker, depending on your area you may lose power or decide to want to conserve energy during this time.
I wanted to share a solution that has kept my homelab stable during occasional power blips.
About 2 years ago as my server and networking infrastructure was growing, I was becoming more aware of how to protect equipment from loss of power, power surges, or overloading circuits. I came across a good deal on an APC Smart-UPS C 1K tower-style UPS. I got it for 50% off from Walmart along with a protection plan, so it was really hard to pass up..but I digress.
The the following image is what the back of my UPS looks like, I do not have a Network Management Controller on mine (kind of bummed me out), so this does not allow for LAN management and using APC software to monitor and alert.
The red highlighted ethernet port is assigned an internal IP address and requires internet connectivity to reach out to APC Schneider Electric’s SaaS solution https://smartconnect.apc.com
The purple highlighted port is USB and with that port I’m using it to connect directly into my Synology DS1515+ (Network Attached Storage)
A little bit about Smart Connect functionality, I have my Gmail registered and I receive alarms such as the following, sometimes the order the e-mails come do not align with the actions, you can get an idea what is happening here.
Here is a glimpse of the APC Smart Connect console, while there have been changes with APC and it’s model for remote managing, so far I’ve paid nothing for the service but believe there are upcoming changes to that.
Protecting the Synology DiskStation
That USB port referenced above in back of the APC is hooked up directly to one of my Synology DS1515+.
From the Synology DiskStation Interface you can access your Control Panel >> Hardware & Power >> UPS Here you can find all the settings related to Power and where we tell our Synology we have a UPS connected to it.
You can see I have enabled ‘UPS support’ and below that Synology detects the UPS hardware. I set a number of minutes on UPS until the DiskStation can gracefully shutdown.
My Synology notification system does show notifications
Of Course you can also select to be notified on these events via email, this can also be managed under the ‘Notifications section in the Control Panel
While my read/writes are not high on the NAS, my VMFS file system for the VM environment is idle but of course storage can cause file system corruption so be aware of that.
Hope you find this helpful! Cheers!