rmalayter's questions

We have a small datacenter with seven APC 5000VA rackmount UPS. These have had regular battery replacement, but have just passed 10 years of service. We also have a boxed spare unit of the same model in storage.

The devices have seen very few outages or power events over the 10-year period, perhaps 2 total outages and 15 under-volt incidents over 10 years.

I need to decide if it is time to budget for replacing these UPS, which I would like to delay as long as possible as the replacement cost will be in excess of $35000 USD.

How long should the electronics/relays/etc in an line-interactive UPS last? Are there any safety issues, such as increased fire risk from aging electronics? I have heard of capacitor-failure-induced fires in UPS units, but those were from long ago and involved on-line UPS. These are line-interactive units, so the high-power electronics should be seeing no load 99.9% of the time, correct?.

The manufacturer of course suggests capacitors only last “up to 10 years”, but that seems to be a biased source.

We have replaced all the batteries 3 times over 10 years and everything seems to be working fine.

The UPS all still pass their weekly self-tests, which include a switch to battery for several minutes to measure voltages and runtime.

All of our severs and switch pairs are connected to at least two different UPS, so losing one unit to failure will not impact availability, and as I mentioned we have a stocked spare.

APC even still sells the exact same model of UPS as new.

Looking for informed experience from DC operators.

I'm having a problem getting /server-status to work Apache 2.2.14 on Ubuntu Server 10.04.1.

The default symlinks for status.load and status.conf are present in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled. The status.conf does include the location /server-status and appropriate allow/deny directives.

However, the only vhost I have in sites-enabled looks like this. The idea is to proxy anything with a Tomcat URL to a cluster of tomcats, and anything else to an IIS box. However, this seems to result in requests to /server-status being sent to IIS. Copying the /server-status in explicitly to the Vhost configuration doesn't seem to help, no matter what order I use. Is it possible to include /server-status do this within a vhost configuration that has a "default" proxy rule?:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

DocumentRoot /var/www

Header add Set-Cookie "ROUTEID=.%{BALANCER_WORKER_ROUTE}e; path=/" env=BALANCER_ROUTE_CHANGED
<Proxy balancer://tomcatCluster>
    BalancerMember ajp://qa-app1:8009 route=1
    BalancerMember ajp://qa-app2:8009 route=2
    ProxySet stickysession=ROUTEID
</Proxy>
<ProxyMatch "^/(mytomcatappA|mytomcatappB)/(.*)" >
    ProxyPassMatch  balancer://tomcatCluster/$1/$2
</ProxyMatch>
#proxy anything that's not a tomcat URL to IIS on port 80
<Proxy />
    ProxyPass http://qa-web1/
</Proxy>