Parallels Preventing UPS from Shutting Down?

[Dadioh]

Just got an APC 750VA UPS for my Macpro1,1. My main intent is to survive the occasional brown out / power bump that I see (I am rural). Most of the time it is just enough to shut things down but doesn't last for more than a second or two.

My Mac Pro seems to be drawing at about 65% of capacity according to the info from the UPS monitor. This estimates about 5 minutes of runtime. However, all I want is to gracefully shut down and not run for any longer. So I set it to shut down when there are 3 minutes left on the UPS. I ran a test by unplugging the UPS and sure enoguh the system did try and shut down (blue screen with spinner) but it took much longer than it ought to and then shut down suddenly so I think that it actually ran out of juice rather than a proper shut down.

What I suspect is that I run Parallels (Windows 7) and probably Parallels was refusing to quit. So I am looking for a way to pass on the info to Parallels to tell Windows 7 to shut down so OSX can proceed with a shut down. Maybe I should install APC powerchute SW in Windows 7 and see if it can work with the UPS? But not sure if the USB connection is shared between OSX and Parallels...

Kind of rambling here... sorry... If you have a similar situation with a UPS and Parallels can you tell me how you solved this?

Also, wasn't sure which forum to post in. Tried a search for UPS but that mostly found courier related issues

Thanks

 

[PokerGuy]

Did you get an answer to this at all? I am in the process of hooking up my new UPS to my iMac and will likely come across the same problem. Anyone have any ideas? Would it be worthwhile just installing powerchute onto the Windows OS running in parallels to shut that down right away before the OSX starts shutting down?

 

[Dadioh]

Did you get an answer to this at all? I am in the process of hooking up my new UPS to my iMac and will likely come across the same problem. Anyone have any ideas? Would it be worthwhile just installing powerchute onto the Windows OS running in parallels to shut that down right away before the OSX starts shutting down?

Never did get an answer and was running into issues with the UPS randomly shutting down the Mac Pro which is a major pain since this is my server. My solution was to just disconnect the USB communications from the UPS and just use it in dumb mode. Most of my issues are with very temporary brown outs or glitches so the UPS handles that fine. If I actually lose power and happen to be home I turn off the server manually.

Not ideal but I don't really want to spend $400-$600 for a UPS to handle the full power of the Mac Pro long enough to shut down both Windows and OS X.

As far as installing Powerchute in windows I don't think that would work. Parallels doesn't share USB devices between the OS's AFAIK. When you plug in a USB device I think you have to choose which OS will have control of it.