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APC does this on UPSes. It’s an extremely bad practice that drives people crazy. They use a standard connector, like serial, RJ45, or USB, but with a non-standa
by orev 7y ago
APC does this on UPSes. It’s an extremely bad practice that drives people crazy. They use a standard connector, like serial, RJ45, or USB, but with a non-standard pinout and give you a custom cable. God help you if you throw that cable in a box with other standard cables. And if you plug a standard cable into this non-standard port, the UPS panics and completely shuts down, including anything you have connected to it.
APC devices are generally pretty good, except for this infuriating and dangerous “feature”.
It’s almost 2020, and vendors still have this ridiculous idea that they can lock you into their proprietary ecosystem by doing stuff like this.
- bashinator 7y agoI actually know why this is a thing! Originally, APC UPS's used RTS/CTS flow control on the RS-232 connector for communication with the host PC. They wanted to maintain this compatibility (which used a nonstandard wiring) when they later added the Smart-UPS protocol. That said, there's absolutely zero reason to keep maintaining this ancient and dangerous option.
- oakwhiz 7y agoI think they call this cable an RJ50 cable, although I'm not sure if it's the same one that you're referring to.