Sunday, April 26, 2009

APC UPS Beeper Silencing

After loosing a disk drive to a power failure, I finally broke down and bought a UPS for my Mac mini running OS-X server. The UPS works well but has a loud beep to warn you when it's lost power. That's great for an office setting but not for my home.

I initially used the built in support in Leopard server (10.5.6) with the APC Back-UPS ES 450 to perform a system shutdown when the battery gets drained. I tried installing the APC PowerChute Personal Edition (1.3.4) but it didn't appear to have any more functionality than what's built into the O/S!?

I then tried the Windows version (2.0) in a virtual machine. It had just what I wanted:

Unplugging from the VM, the UPS retained the setting. Outstanding questions:
  • Was there an easier, preferably Mac native, way?
  • There is a time-based option for silence. Is this implemented in the host O/S (Windows) or on board the UPS?