Background

A week ago, Eskom announced that there will be more load shedding around South Africa. I have been procrastinating getting a UPS or some form of backup power for a while now. This past week has been hectic. 

Eskom has changed the schedule and instead of a single 4 hour block without power, its now 2 x 2.5 blocks. So for today, my schedule was 08:00 – 10:30 and then 16:00 – 1830. So on the old schedule, I would have maybe 2 daytime power cuts for the week, but now its almost daily.

UPS

Enough about Eskom, so I bought a UPS (1000VA). This will power my router & wifi modem during the power cuts so that I can continue with work. As in most areas, when the power goes off, the cell towers also switch off. So, while I have a mobile line from work, its basically useless unless if I drive to an area with power.

This model I got came with a software installation CD (yes, compact disk). At first, I just laughed it off and threw it in the box. My laptop does not even have a CD tray (face palm).

After setting up the UPS, I let it charge for the recommended 6 hours and then this morning I had internet during the power cut.  Hooray! But then after like a minute, I had had enough of the constant beep coming from the UPS. It beeped every 10seconds, alerting me that there is no power…

I started googling about how to turn off the beeping and the interwebs suggested that you need to use the software provided along with the UPS. That software gives you access to a console/dashboard to disable the beeping, the interwebs said.

CD Tray

But I do not have a CD tray, how do I install the Software? So I thought let me find the name of the Software and then, surely, there should be a url where I can download the software right? WRONG! 

My brother-in-law then provided me with an external CD tray. Didn’t know such a thing existed, but it saved me today.

Adobe Flash Player

After installing the software, I clicked ‘Start Monitor’ and then the browser navigated to localhost:15178/ViewPower/ which then responded with:

Alternate HTML content should be placed here. This content requires the Adobe Flash Player. Get Flash

I panicked a little bit, tried to install flash, but its no longer supported anywhere. Tried getting old versions of Chrome/Firefox etc, but the risk of downloading some malware was too much.

Docker & Xpra to the rescue

After a bit more googling, I came across this docker image that runs a version of Firefox with Flash preinstalled: fmount/firefox-flash. This image had instructions on how to use Xpra (which I had never heard of) to browse the Firefox from your desktop. Here’s a screen shot:

From here, I was able to disable the beeping and right now as I type, the power just went out a few minutes ago and guess what, no BEEPING!

Commands

1. Run the docker container and expose port 10000:

docker run -d -p 10000:10000 -v /etc/hosts:/etc/hosts:rw fmount/firefox-flash

2. Attach xpra to port 10000:

xpra attach tcp:localhost:10000

Thats all, really.

Now, because you are browsing from within the docker container, you will have to replace localhost with your host IP in the url ‘http://localhost:15178/ViewPower/’