Urgent heads-up for everyone running PowerChute BE 6.x 1

[zephyran]

This information is courtesy of Tek-Tips user "darksasami" in the Symantec Antivirus forum, in response to a problem I posted:

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1101320&page=1

PowerChute Business Edition 6.x stops working properly on July 27, 2005. Apparently there is a certificate in the Java runtime used by 6.x that expired on that day. If a server running PBE 6.x is rebooted on or after that day, you could experience problems ranging from PowerChute no longer gracefully shutting down a server during a power outage, to a server hanging on boot (which is what happened to me). Here is the APC article darksasami posted:

http://nam-en.apc.com/cgi-bin/nam_e...WRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9NDMzJnBfcGFnZT0x&p_li=

Thanks for the help, darksasami! If you find this information useful, please go to my original thread in the Symantec Antivirus forum (through the first link in this post) and give darksasami a star!

 

[Dollie]

We discovered the exact same thing on Friday, from a Symantec tech as well. It was shutting down absolutely everything on the server. Took a lot of hair-raising hours to fix it.

A thought I had over the weekend, not sure if it'll work... Think I can I skip installing version 7 and just use the console connection to check my APCs instead?

 

[zephyran]

I don't know about that, though I'd imagine there's a way. It's probably not supported by APC. Also, you'd lose the software's functionality of a soft shutdown in case of a power outage (unless you can write some kind of script that can take care of that).

 

[Dollie]

At this point I'm tempted to find a sacrificial computer and try it out. Not sure I'm willing to wait out version 7, wondering when it's going to die.

 

[sharper]

I find windows 2000 and windows 2003 native APC support to be adequate. less annoying 'cause it's installed anyway and installing powerchute seems more complicated than it needs to be.

 

[Dollie]

Am I the only one who just got an official notice about this?

*Users of version 6.x Must Upgrade to version 7.x due to JRE retirement*

Failure to update your server software immediately may result in difficulty booting and/or accessing the control panel on your Windows server. Affected servers will not gracefully shut down due to power events.

 

[zephyran]

Nope, I just got it myself as well. It would have been nice if they'd sent it about a month ago, before our servers started locking up.

 

[uptime]

I had this problem as well. I also run the client software on our workstations and a couple of those would not start on July 28th. After many hours of trouble-shooting and failed repair attempts I traced it to the PowerChute software and upgraded all copies on our network. It caused a number of seemingly unrelated issues including log-on issues, control panel items that wouldn't open, Symantec AV disabled etc. I notified APC tech support of the problem on 8/1 and encouraged them to update the tech bulletin and be more specific about the possible issues. I agree that "not gracefully shutting down" is a huge understatement. I have always been impressed with their technical support but was very disappointed with the handling of this issue. They really didn't even begin to admit the scope of the problem until reboots required by Microsoft's monthly updates last week caused more widespread problems.

If you are having problems ans suspect this, go into services and disable PCBEAGENT. You will probably see that it's status is still listed as "starting". Once you disable that all the other problems disappear.

 

[cyberspace]

I also encountered this issue.

The symptoms for me were that on boot up, our anti virus wasn't starting, aswell as other services.

Initially I thought it was being caused by Net Op.

However, on inspection of the Services, i noticed that the APC Agent was hanging on "Starting"

Googled, and found the issue, which was corrected immediately.

I rang APC, they mentioned that people had been alot worse off than me, particularly those using Citix systems for log on....they had been unable to access their networks at all!

So we managed to get away with that one....however it's quite a big thing to happen, they way it was communicated was very poor.