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.
Crossed Wires 