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pfSense

Using NUT to monitor a CyberPower UPS in pfSense

This post is probably of interest only to me, and I'm posting it just because I'm getting tired of remembering where I stored this tidbit on my Mac.

Our home router is a Protectli box running pfSense firewall/router software; the Protectli box is connected to a CyberPower UPS. Within pfSense, you can install the Network UPS Tools package (called NUT in pfSense) to monitor and report on the UPS; here's how it looks in the overview screen:

After recently updating to a newer Protectli box, however, all I saw was a message that read "Cannot communicate with UPS" (or something close to that). I knew I had a fix for this issue somewhere, but I couldn't remember where. Today I found it, so also today, it goes on my blog so I'll always know where it is…

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Add inelegance to remove heat

At home, our network routing and firewall is handled by an open-source software package called pfSense®; it has a ton of features, and is relatively easy to configure. I built a mini PC (a box roughly 9" per side) for pfSense, and it's been running smoothly for over five years1I'll be writing more about pfSense and my routing PCs in a future post..

While it's not the world's loveliest box…ok, so it may be the world's ugliest box…

…it's been rock solid since day one. However, it's aging and its CPU won't be supported in an upcoming pfSense release, so I decided to replace it. (That way, I'll have a spare if the new one breaks…at least until that unsupported version of pfSense is released.) Here's the new box…

That's a Protectli fanless Firewall Appliance with a quad-core Celeron J3160 CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage. And yes, it's just a bit smaller and more elegant than my old box—the entire thing is roughly the size of my old box's external cooling fan.

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