When we left our hero, he was waiting valiantly for the arrival of his new UPS…  :)  The UPS arrived (eventually, after an order placement mixup at Powerfirm’s fulfilment provider) and was duly ignored for a day or so (I do have to work for a living).  When I got a few moments to strap together, I set about doing some of the peripheral jobs needed to relocate the UPS into the garage.

Since the servers and the network gear are currently in the study, the UPS being in the garage produced a bit of a disconnect.  It all came together though when I realised that the electricians were going to run the Cat 5 to the same place in the garage.  By relocating the network kit to the garage as well, I could achieve a bit of a reduction in heat and noise generation in the study.  The downside was bringing a stack of network cables (and to a lesser extent the power leads) back into the study…

I figured that I just needed to pop my network patch board through the wall and I’d be done.  It almost ended up being that simple, too!  A local electrical supply store provided me with some cabling grommets that I could use to neatly and professionally throw my cabling through the wall between the garage and the study.  A bit of re-terminating later and 16 Cat 5 cables (with a patch panel at each end) ran from garage to study without running through doorways!

The last issue to overcome was monitoring of the UPS.  The supplied serial cable was way too short, and even the extended-length one that came with the old rackmount UPS was never going to make it.  The new UPS has a USB interface with a special cable (I’d never seen a 10-way RJ45 in the wild before), but USB is even more affected by cable length.  I know that serial can be run over even old Cat 3 cable, but being a “smart” UPS cable there was a very good chance it wouldn’t work.  I thought about running the USB over Cat 5, and found that too had been done with little more than a couple of jacks and a soldering iron… but with warnings a-plenty about current limitations and other “dangers”, I was reluctant to get the solder-station out just yet.

Google to the rescue again!  I found a mob that produces a device that extends USB up to 50m over Cat 5 cable.  Better still, their Australian operation is right here in Brisbane!    (That’s the reason I was journeying to Brisbane’s northside recently, see other post…)  Props to LINDY Australia, your little Cat 5 USB Extender and one of my Cat 5 garage-study runs got my UPS talking to my server again!

Now all that remains is to bring the phone/VMware server back downstairs so it can join in the new-UPS fun (a task enabled by the extra Cat 5 runs the electricians pulled), and the work will be all complete.

My old UPS, a SmartUPS 1400RM, threw a battery recently.  It didn’t complain about battery failure, it just wouldn’t hold charge and couldn’t carry a load.  With the quality of the power we get here, combined with the sensitivity of the UPS, it meant that my server and network were dropping out on a very regular basis (I think it got up to every twenty minutes at one stage).  So, with a tax refund burning a hole in my pocket, I went shopping.

At first I was just going to replace with an equivalent.  The old one was nearly eight years old, however, and “they don’t make ‘em like they used to”.  The rack I have is only a tiny wall-mount type (that I put castors on so it runs on the floor) and is nowhere near full depth — but virtually all the APC UPSes now are at least as deep as they are wide (the 2200VA 2RU job is about 650mm) and are way too big for my housing.

So I decided to go with a tower (floor-standing) version, and with the cost-saving from doing that I could more easily justify an upgrade to the 2200VA version.  A very helpful fellow at PowerFirm told me everything I needed to know, and toward the end of the conversation said “now, you know that these units need a 15A plug, right?”  Well of course I didn’t…

So then I rang around looking for the electrician that would do such a job in the fortnight leading up to Christmas.  I found one, and a couple of days later they arrived.  I indicated where the point was to be installed, right near an existing one in the garage.  Sparky replied “well, it’s got to be on it’s own circuit.”  Oh, crap, well of course it does, doesn’t it…  ”Where’s the power box?” he asks, and I reply “the other side of the house…”  Both our faces fall: his upon seeing a 15 minute quick fill-in job turning into possibly hours of pulling cable through sealed walls, and me upon realising that the job that I could pay for with the cash in my wallet turing into something far more expensive.

I figured I needed to make the most of the situation, so I asked the guys to pull some Cat 5 for me while they were in the walls (which leads to Vic’s Household Hacker Tip #1: Always keep 100m or so of Cat 5 lying around; you never know when you might be able to get some cabling done).

So the stage was set…  all I needed was the UPS to arrive…  Stay tuned for Part Two!

Having grown up on the north side of Brisbane, I became familiar with the narrow (relatively speaking) roads and often convoluted ways of getting from place to place there.  In comparison to the south side, dominated by Brisbane’s only (well, it was in my youth) freeway, driving on the northside actually required some ability to navigate and, well, drive…

Recently I had to locate a store on the north side and, armed with the address and a fifteen-year-old knowledge of street layouts, I set off.  I did eventually find the store (more on that in another post, perhaps), but in the process got hit upside the head by a realisation that even in Brisbane the pace of change can overtake the unwary.

All I needed to have done was look at a street directory before leaving, and I would have realised that I was not headed for the Sandgate Road, Albion of my youth.  Instead, I blindly trusted my ancient knowledge would guide me safely.

To be fair to myself, it’s not like the whole of the northside has been torn up and rebuilt — the part of Sandgate Road that I was looking for just happened to be the part that got a freeway parked on top of it.  That general area of the inner-north of Brisbane got fairly well rearranged by the Inner-City Bypass.  In the end, my ancient knowledge did save me from getting completely and hopelessly lost, but the exercise ended up being a lot longer than the quick duck-out-before-work-in-light-school-holiday-traffic trip I was hoping for.