The continuing UPS saga
I've been continuing to monitor the behavior of my UPS using the UPSwatch tool I wrote. It is quite consistently, every 48 hours, going into a mode in which, although still on line power, its output vopltage drops from 125V to 115V and it begins suddenly discharging its battery pack. The battery charge plummets at first, then gradually levels out, dropping to just over 40% over a period of about five hours before leveling out. It did it again at about 1900 yesterday, had almost completely leveled out at somewhere around 44% by midnight, and now seems to be holding steady at 43.1% charge. It will apparently remain at this charge level indefinitely until I interrupt line power for a few seconds, forcing it to switch over to battery. Then, when I reconnect the power, it will switch back to line and say, "Oh, gee, I guess I should recharge this battery, huh?" and charge the battery back to 100% charge, typically within 20 to 30 minutes. Then, 48 hours later, it'll go through the whole rigmarole again. You can see an example here.
This time, I'm just going to let it sit for a couple of days before I bump the power, just to see what happens. Needless to say, this is getting pretty old. It's looking fairly clear that the UPS has a fault somewhere in its firmware.
Granted, it does have old firmware. I need to see if I can get it reflashed to the latest firmware (which can be done only from Windows) and see if that solves the problem.
(Update: The gap in the data is where I had upsd stopped while I hunted for the correct-type-and-polarity serial cable I could have SWORN I had in order to reflash the UPS with new firmware ... no such luck.)
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