Regular readers of my blog will know that I love the CIA triad – confidentiality, integrity and availability – as applied to security. Much of the time, I tend to talk about the first two, and spend little time on the third, but today I thought I’d address the balance a little bit by talking about UPSes – Uninterruptible Power Supplies. For anyone who was hoping for a trolling piece on giving extra powers to US Government agencies, it’s time to move along to another blog. And anyone who thinks I’d stoop to a deliberately misleading article title just to draw people into reading the blog … well, you’re here now, so you might as well read on (and you’re welcome to visit others of my articles such as Do I trust this package?, A cybersecurity tip from Hazzard County, and, of course, Defending our homes).
Years ago, when I was young and had more time on my hands, I ran an email server for my own interest (and accounts). This was fairly soon after we moved to ADSL, so I had an “always-on” connection to the Internet for the first time. I kept it on a pretty basic box behind a pretty basic firewall, and it served email pretty well. Except for when it went *thud*. And the reason it went *thud* was usually because of power fluctuations. We live in a village in the East Anglian (UK) countryside where the electricity supply, though usually OK, does go through periods where it just stops from time to time. Usually for under a minute, admittedly, but from the point of view of most computer systems, even a second of interruption is enough to turn them off. Usually, I could reboot the machine and, after thinking to itself for a while, it would come back up – but sometimes it wouldn’t. It was around this time, if I remember correctly, that I started getting into journalling file systems to reduce the chance of unrecoverable file system errors. Today, such file systems are custom-place: in those days, they weren’t.
Even when the box did come back up, if I was out of the house, or in the office for the day, on holiday, or travelling for business, I had a problem, which was that the machine was now down, and somebody needed to go and physically turn it on if I wanted to be able to access my email. What I needed was a way to provide uninterruptible power to the system if the electricity went off, and so I bought a UPS: an Uninterruptible Power System. A UPS is basically a box that sits between your power socket and your computer, and has a big battery in it which will keep your system going for a while in the event of a (short) power failure and the appropriate electronics to provide AC power out from the battery. Most will also have some sort of way to communicate with your system such as a USB port, and software which you can install to talk to it that your system can decide whether or not to shut itself down – when, for instance, the power has been off for long enough that the battery is about to give out. If you’re running a data centre, you’ll typically have lots of UPS boxes keeping your most important servers up while you wait for your back-up generators to kick in, but for my purposes, knowing that my email server would stay up for long enough that it would ride out short power drops, and be able to shut down gracefully if the power was out for longer, was enough: I have no interest in running my own generator.
That old UPS died probably 15 years ago, and I didn’t replace it, as I’d come to my senses and transferred my email accounts to a commercial provider, but over the weekend I bought a new one. I’m running more systems now, some of them are fairly expensive and really don’t like power fluctuations, and there are some which I’d really prefer not to have to restart every time we have a minor power cut. Here’s what I decided I wanted:
- a product with good open source software support;
- something which came in under £150;
- something with enough “juice” (batter power) to tide 2-3 systems over a sub-minute power cut;
- something with enough juice to keep one low-powered box running for a little longer than that, to allow it to coordinate shutting down the other boxes first, and then take itself down if required;
- something with enough ports to keep a a couple of network switches up while the previous point happened (I thought ahead!);
- Lithium Ion rather than Lead battery if possible.
I ended up buying an APC BX950UI, which meets all of my requirements apart from the last one: it turns out that only high-end UPS systems currently seem to have moved to Lithium Ion battery technology. There are two apparently well-maintained open source software suites that support APC UPS systems: apcupsd and nut, both of which are available for my Linux distribution of choice (Fedora). As it happens, they both also have support for Windows and Mac, so you can mix and match if needs be. I chose nut, which doesn’t explicitly list my model of UPS, but which supports most of the product lower priced product line with its usbhid-ups driver – I knew that I could move to apsupsd if this didn’t work out, but nut worked fine.
Set up wasn’t difficult, but required a little research (and borrowing a particular cable/lead from a kind techie friend…), and I plan to provide details of the steps I took in a separate article or articles to make things easier for people wishing do replicate something close to my set-up. However, I’m currently only using it on one system, so haven’t set up the coordinated shutdown configuration. I’ll wait till I’ve got it more set up before trying that.
What has this got to do with security? Well, I’m planning to allow VPN access to at least one of the boxes, and I don’t want it suddenly to disappear, leaving a “hole in the network”. I may well move to a central authentication mechanism for this and other home systems (if you’re interested, check out projects such as yubico-pam): and I want the box that provides that service to stay up. I’m also planning some home automation projects where access to systems from outside the network (to view cameras, for instance) will be a pain if things just go down: IoT devices may well just come back up in the event of a power failure, but the machines which coordinate them are less likely to do so.
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