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APC firmware management and configuration management

APC already has a lot of the hooks for this available.

The ability to push out a firmware update to all of your APC devices at once. This can be done by sending the update file to the FTP server on the management card and then running the update command on the unit.

The configuration files are XML files that can be uploaded to the unit and imported running a command. The ability to push out a config template to all the APC devices at the same time would also be valuable.

I pay for the APC Infrastructureware software for the updates, the config template, and the monitoring and I would rather have these features integrated into one monitoring tool.

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Comments

rschroeder

Your idea is a good one, and I've requested it previously from Solarwinds.

We used APC's StruxureWare to do this, but the product claimed the sun and moon while it only delivered burned toast crumbs. It actually DOS'd me and my team each with 500,000 e-mails one day. What a mess to recover from! We dumped it and now have nothing that can perform bulk configuration changes or firmware upgrades to 200+ APC devices that NPM monitors.

A drawback to APC's is their FTP limitations. For starters, our Security Team requires us to disable FTP access to the UPS's. This means before we can use an app like NCM to push out updates via FTP we must first SSH or web into the UPS and enable FTP and apply the change. Worse, certain changes to an APC's administration via the network require the UPS's NIC to be reset, requiring another set of commands and responses, then a wait period of 30 seconds or more as the thing's network resets.

If Solarwinds can provide full administration of APC UPS's for configs and their changes, another whole set of customers in the world will turn to Solarwinds for this solution. @yumdarling , I suspect his one idea would get you a ton of attention from non-Solarwinds people. APC's need config management and full administration capabilities in NPM/NCM. Let the right folks know, get them developing it, and it'll be the better mousetrap that the world will beat a path to your door to buy.

foonly

There are klugey ways to use NCM to twiddle the FTP setting, and then push the firmware from a Windows command line script, but I have not automated it.

There is a standalone APC/Schneider tool, FW_R2_Upgrade.exe, that can upgrade multiple devices once FTP is enabled on the devices. But it lacks the intelligence to prevent loading the wrong firmware for the device, which can seriously mess up a device, if you're not careful.

There are still separate APC and Schneider web sites, which are not mirrors of each other - apc.com vs. se.com. That's a mess, too.

pieceofbrain

Hello. This is my first post here.

Please take a look at the APC-PDU-Configure python solution.

Author says:

This module is used to mass configure APC Power Distribution Units (PDU).

I found it today, and will test tomorrow on various APC equipment, not only PDU's.

pieceofbrain

Hi. Hope you've seen that:

Mass Configuration of Users and User Preferences on Network Management Card 2 (NMC2) v6.X.X

Published date: 20 December 2019