I haven't had any experience with TrippLite's interface, but I've gotten very frustrated with java interfaces lately and avoid them if possible. APC's web interface is both simple and easy. I use their switched rack PDUs, but I believe the interface is the same for metered. It's simple and easy, but has enough features to be generally useful to me. Justin H. Ian Mock wrote:

+1 for APC, HTML based GUI, also supports major management protocols. Never had a problem with it.

Ian Mock

-----Original Message----- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Aaron C. de Bruyn Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 4:43 PM To: Dovid Bender Cc: NANOG Subject: Re: APC vs TrippLite metered PDU's

If I recall correctly, they have an HTML-based GUI. I rarely use it. I mainly use SSH and SNMP which they support as well.

-A

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 1:53 PM, Dovid Bender <dovid@telecurve.com> wrote:

...

Hello All,

We currently use TrippLite and over all have been very happy with their metered PDU's. When we first started out we had some minor issues and their support went above and beyond. Lately the their Java web interface has been becoming a real pain. More and more browsers lock it by default and it takes a lot of work to get it working correctly. Does anyone have any experience with APC? How are is management of their devices and over all how do they operate?

TIA.

Dovid

Hello Dovid, we've been using APC devices (including PDUs) for a couple of years. Occasionally the MGMT cards of the devices stop responding, we had to manually reset them on site (Reset is possible without affecting the devices, it won't toggle any relays). This has been a rare event (~once every 10 years). Overall they are running stable. You shouldn't expect any long time software/bug fix support either. E.g. they didn't fix their SSL implementation when the POODLE attack came up on various slightly older devices (the devices only support SSLv3 so it's hard to use HTTPS nowadays). On older devices (first generation) enabling HTTPS will make the interface become really slow too (apparently due to CPU limitations). On the new MGMT cards (second generation) they apparently added some crypto hardware offloading chips to fix that. Proper HTTPS support is the biggest issue we're still having with them. In order to enable HTTPS on the webinterface you've to use their "APC Security Wizard" to generate the key and get the CSR, once you got it signed you've to use the Wizard again to import the certificate, then upload the resulting file to the device. The Wizard is only available for Windows and is a basic GUI application, there's no easy automation possible. If you have a couple of 100 devices, renewing certificates for them is a relay annoying task. Their solution for this is to get a wildcard certificate and use the same certificate on all devices. Besides that there's no support for intermediate certificates which in practice forces you to install any intermediate certificate on your devices from which you're planning to access the webinterface. This was first reported in 2007 and is still not fixed: http://forums.apc.com/spaces/7/ups-management-devices-powerchute-software/fo... If you've a company policy which forces you to use proper certificates, etc. for the webinterface using APC will be painful. If you'll use the webinterface rarely and handle the switching, etc. via SNMP you should be fine. If you have any probelm try their their forum (Their normal ticketing system support is really bad). Best Regards, Frederik Kriewitz On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 12:57 AM, Craig Tomkow <ctomkow@gmail.com> wrote:

APC PDUs have been good. Their HTTPS interface moves like molasses iirc, but as long as you have some SNMP mgmt platform (APC struxureware for us), then you are good.