APC Vendor Options

Serving APC Vendor Options

The AP9617 (and presumably the other management cards in the same immediate family) are set by default to do a DHCP request for an IP address on reset or power up. However, they will reject any lease which does not come with the magic APC DHCP "cookie", which is an option (referred to in the documentation as "option 43").

What I do is set a reservation in my ISC dhcpd as so:

host ups-5000-monitor
{
        hardware ethernet 0:c0:b7:xx:xx:xx;
        fixed-address 10.16.15.51;
        option vendor-encapsulated-options 43:01:04:31:41:50:43;
}

...and then reset the card. The card will then pick up the DHCP reservation.

I then connect to the card and change the DHCP parameters to static.

I do this because many of these management devices will only DHCP once at startup. In a power failure situation, it is highly unlikely that your dhcp server will resume faster than the little brain in this management card, so you run the risk that it will never pick up its IP address again after a power outage. Static devices don't need dhcp server support in order to start.