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APC Smart-UPS 1400 Battery replacement

2015/03/19 By staze

Having just gotten a replacement battery for my Smart-UPS 1400, I went to replace the battery, only to have the UPS randomly shutdown. I had had this issue before where if you removed the front panel and metal plate, the UPS would randomly turn off and on again. Figuring it was some cold solder joint, to bad ribbon cable between the front panel and UPS, I took everything apart to troubleshoot. Sadly, I couldn’t find the issue. I did decide to figure out why the battery never seemed to seat fully, and really, it’s due to bad design on APC’s part. The terminal connector for the battery is supposed to neatly fall into a recessed area of the chassis, and lay flat enough for the battery to seat. 9/10 with my unit though, the terminal would end up sideways, and prevent the battery from fully inserting. Worse, and this is why the unit was turning off, when this happened, and you tried to press the battery all the way back, one of the standoffs holding the PCB to the chassis would tweak enough to cause some board fault, and shut down (I haven’t dug further, I just saw the tweaking happening when the UPS case was removed).

So, as a note for anyone that might have one of these units. Don’t try to hotswap the battery. Just shut stuff down, remove the case (6 screws on the bottom), and then replace the battery while you can see the terminal connection. Then you can actually see if it’s laying properly in the chassis, and the battery will slide all the way into the unit. You can “help” it do this by making sure the battery cables are laying “down” rather than up, or back. Just, a crappy design on APC’s part. The only way I can see it always working right would be if the battery, and UPS, cables were silicone coated rather than PVC, and therefore were a bit more relaxed, and wanted to let gravity have it’s way. Maybe it also has to do with the unit being 20 years old at this point, and the PVC hardening. Either way, not a great design.

Good luck!

American Battery Company

2015/03/09 By staze

Update 1: Got an email from the ABC manager asking what he could do to make it right, again stating their “We’re the only company to warranty our products for 2 years”, which, statistically, means nothing. I would imagine after looking at failure rates, they saw >80% of SLA batteries they source failed after 2 years, so there was no reason to not increase their warranty. Anyway, I responded that they could offer a discount on a new product, or at the very least, adjust their process so they’re not asking out of warranty customers to fill out an RMA form. I’ll post another update if I hear more…

Update 2: Okay, they’ve redeemed themselves. The manager that got ahold of me yesterday got back to me today and said he was shipping me a replacement today. He did apologize for rigamarole that I went through. So yes, the original post is moot. Thank you ABC for coming through on this.

Update 3: Got the battery. Interestingly, looks like it’s better built than the original. Thanks ABC!

Just over two years ago, I purchased a replacement battery for my APC Smart-UPS 1400. I’d used ABC batteries in the past, and hadn’t really seen anything wrong with them (or right, they just worked). Over the weekend, however, the battery that was, quite literally, a month and a half past it’s 2 year warranty, triggered an alert that it needed to be replaced.

I contacted ABC, and they said they’d consider the warranty, and had me fill out an RMA request. At this point, I had already told them when it was purchased, and that it was less than 2 months outside warranty. So, I filled out the request, and expected something positive to come of it (at least the option for a discounted replacement purchase). Instead, an hour later, I got a reply from the same person that had told me to fill out the RMA request, that they wouldn’t be able to help me. So, why the hell did they have me fill out the RMA request?

Needless to say, I have a very thin tolerance for shitty customer service (see some previous posts). When there are probably a solid dozen non-OEM battery companies out there wanting to get my business, why should I keep giving it to a company that doesn’t back their product when it fails JUST outside warranty, and doesn’t give any recourse, at all. I think Tommy Boy summed up this experience pretty well.

~~So, ABC is no longer someone I will be able to recommend, nor will I do business with them again.~~

fail2ban WordPress and Cloudflare

2015/01/12 By staze

Like most people that run a WordPress site, or any CMS, I’ve struggled with brute force attacks on my site. Having just installed fail2ban on a mail server, this seemed like an obvious. Thankfully, as well, someone had already written a plugin for WordPress to drop a message in the system log saying a login failed (by default, Apache doesn’t do this, it just shows someone hit the login page). At first, I had set up an iptables/pf rule to block the bad user, but for some reason, this wasn’t happening. My test browser kept hitting the page successfully.

After a break, I realized that I use Cloudflare, and of course blocking the offending IP wouldn’t work… it never actually connects to my host. Thankfully, Cloudflare has an API, and there was already a starting point for a fail2ban action, albeit, out of date (Cloudflare forces json now). Below is that action. You should be able to just call this like any other action, after you fill out the appropriate “token” and “email”.¹

Good luck!

# Fail2Ban cloudflare action
#
# Author: Ryan Stasel
#
# $Revision$
#

[Definition]

# Option: actionstart
# Notes.: command executed once at the start of Fail2Ban.
# Values: CMD
#
actionstart =

# Option: actionstop
# Notes.: command executed once at the end of Fail2Ban
# Values: CMD
#
actionstop =

# Option: actioncheck
# Notes.: command executed once before each actionban command
# Values: CMD
#
actioncheck =

# Option: actionban
# Notes.: command executed when banning an IP. Take care that the
# command is executed with Fail2Ban user rights.
# Tags: <ip> IP address
# <failures> number of failures
# <time> unix timestamp of the ban time
# Values: CMD
#
actionban = curl -s https://www.cloudflare.com/api_json.html -d ‘a=ban’ -d ‘key=‘ -d ’email=‘ -d ‘tkn=‘

# Option: actionunban
# Notes.: command executed when unbanning an IP. Take care that the
# command is executed with Fail2Ban user rights.
# Tags: <ip> IP address
# <failures> number of failures
# <time> unix timestamp of the ban time
# Values: CMD
#
actionunban = curl -s https://www.cloudflare.com/api_json.html -d ‘a=nul’ -d ‘key=‘ -d ’email=‘ -d ‘tkn=‘

[Init]

account = YOUR_CLOUDFLARE_EMAIL

token = YOUR_CLOUDFLARE_TOKEN

Note: I had to disable “always online” with Cloudflare to have the block take effect within 5-10 seconds. With “always online” enabled, it took about 2-3 minutes to block the attack, all the while the “bot” was able to keep hitting my server. [↩]

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