Minuteman UPS systems - my anger- STAY AWAY.

Hello all,

Here is a short story of my very first experience with Minuteman UPS's.  I have been working on 8 - 3000KV 2-U RM units.

The UPS's look pretty and solid.  They seemed to be okay and honestly, they seem to function okay.  The problem comes with the network management card, SNMP-SSL.  That is the name of the card.

I fired up the UPS systems and remoted into the system with their RJ45 to DB9 interface, using HyperTerminal.  I set a static address and turned off DHCP.

I opened up a web browser to finish configuring it with a pretty interface.  According to their instructions, one step is to check the firmware version with what is available online.  I did.  The firmware on the SNMP-SSL card is 2.05 and the download version is 2.10.  I downloaded the new version from their website.  Again, according to their instructions, you can upgrade the SNMP-SSL card via the embedded web server or their special upgrade utility.

I upgraded the card with their web server, connected using Windows 7, 64bit, using IE8.  The upgrade seemed to take just fine, but didn't.  For some reason, every the card is restarted, DHCP is re-enabled and the static IP Address is over written with a DHCP address.  Every time a setting is changed in the card, the card asks to be restarted for the settings to be applied.  And...as you can guess, if I reset the card, I lose connectivity to the card because it reassigns a DHCP address.  I proved this over and over again.  And then I called support.  OI!

At first they did not believe me that this was the problem.  They had me do all kinds of things that, if I could, I would have reached through the phone and strangled the guy.  "Is it plugged in...is it displaying a page...are there lights on...."  Okay...I get it...they have to go through every possible thing.  But once I let them know I kinda know what I am doing in general, he should have backed off a bit.

So, he had me re-flash the firmware, nada.  Then he said that the web based upgrade doesn't work on IE, so I tried Firefox, nada.  Then he said that it doesn't work on Windows 7, so I went to Windows XP.  So then they said that the flash doesn't work in the web version at all, and I need to use their special utility to upgrade the firmware, nada.  Then they said that I needed to use a special version of the utility that they had to send me in order for the flash to work, nada.

After about 10 hrs of messing around with this I finally blew a gasket.  Did I mention that these are brand new out of the box?

I asked for them to join.me in a session because they still didn't believe what was happening.  Once they saw it happen right before their eyes, the excuses just kept flying.  "We have thousands of these out in production and this is the first time we are hearing ANY problems!"  Really?!?!  Why is it that is seems that I find all kinds of unknown and unreported bugs?  In this case, maybe nobody else is using the management cards for management?  I just have a hard time believing that "I Tom Hafemann" am finding all kinds of bugs that nobody else in the entire world can find.

So...the manufacturer of the Minuteman UPS's are sending me 8 new SNMP-SSL cards.  If they don't work right out of the box they are going back.  The WHOLE THINGS!

Above all of this, I haven't even begun to configure management yet.  In order to configure the SSL Manager I must have static connection to the Manager server!  Even more GRRRRRRRR.

If you don't mind spending all kinds of time on something simple like a UPS, by all means save some money and buy Minuteman UPS.  Otherwise, buy something for a little more that you know works and will not give you any problems.

A few years ago I tried Eaton UPS and it was really good.  The thing just works, management just works.  The clients just work.  I had the UPS up and running and totally configured on all the systems I wanted in about 2 hrs.