UPS recommendations wanted

[Tom Buskey]

> I've looked at the UPS HOWTO and the hardware support lists for apcupsd
> and NUT, but I'm little uncomfortable buying a UPS without knowing
> others have  had success using it with Linux.  Is anyone willing to
> comment on their  experiences with specific UPSes with Linux?
>
> I'm sure some of you will say things depend on how I'm going to use it.
> Well,  initially like to buy an inexpensive one to use at home with RH8
> and get  familiar with apcupsd and NUT.  Eventually, I'd like to install
> one in my  wife's small office which has a RH8 Samba server and two
> Win98 desktops.
>

I have a UPS so I can weather a 5 minute outage and have a graceful
shutdown.  In a business situation I've also wanted environmental
monitoring (voltage, temp, humidity) and paging/email when events happen. 
Mostly I'm concerned with a graceful shutdown when the power goes out.

I've had good success with APC.  I've used the APC software on Linux &
Solaris.  I've used apcupsd on OpenBSD.  NUT doesn't like APC as much
because they've had to reverse engineer everything.

I would recommend against the Belkin Universal UPS series.  I have one
that worked well with their software on solaris.  Their linux software
can't seem to communicate with the UPS over the serial port.  NUT doesn't
have drivers for it (unless they've added it in the last 3 months).

Since you're looking at NUT, why not follow their recommendations?