Re: debian & ups
Here's answer from smartupstools author, Russell Kroll ..
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1999 01:04:50 -0600
From: Russell Kroll <rkroll@exploits.org>
To: hitzinger@phobos.fphil.uniba.sk
Subject: Re: Shutdowns
> As you see from the mail a Cc-ed to you (it was on debian-mentors), he was
> thinking of other computers, not speakers etc.
It presents an interesting situation. You end up using one machine to
play off another as sort of a "nanny" relationship. I used to do a
similar thing with some DOS boxes by polling files over a peer to peer
network... if it failed, the monitoring system did some X-10 magic and
powered the server down for a little while. This was pretty cruel to the
hardware, but it worked to keep my ancient BBS up during a week of
vacation, and that's all I needed.
Using a UPS to do this is also harsh in terms of power cycling equipment,
but that seems to be the way they want to do it. If I had systems that
needed to be forcibly rebooted remotely, I'd probably connect something to
the reset lines and tie it to the other system's serial port. You'd
only need some simple logic gates to keep it from triggering accidentally.
> Anyway, there's no problem - we just can't prepare automated install for
> such situations. People with special needs will have get their hands dirty
> editing the stuff themselves.
The trick is giving them enough flexibility to rig interesting hacks like
this without overloading the code with needless generic structures. I
imagine that their eventual solution will involve a custom client that
speaks the network protocol and sends manager commands to the upsd. The
actual configuration of which system talks to which UPS should be rather
interesting.
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