Unnamed Administration sources reported that Sean Donelan said:
And what if you are not using APCs?
See the menu of systems listed at: http://www.exploits.org/nut/
One issue with highly redudandent data centers is the failure modes are "interesting." You don't want to shutdown due to a single UPS failure, so you don't use something simple like PowerChute Plus. You most likely don't want to shutdown based on any automatic signal. However, you do want a way for an operator to gracefully shutdown a lot of equipment quickly when the decision is made.
For a server farm, with potentially thousands of individual systems, is there any standard piece of software you can install on all of the systems to act as a receiver of a signal to begin a graceful shutdown that does not depend on a vendor's proprietary interface? Preferabally one which does not involve running a lot of additional wires.
Good point; you'll likely need a box just to talk to UPSi and control shutdowns. That alas, is adding a single point of failure.
Again this is only needed if people want a gracefull shutdown. If you can live with a hard shutdown, you wouldn't require this. If you use ctrl-alt-del as a normal management practice, I suspect you don't really require a graceful shutdown.
You really don't want to run all the UPS batteries flat. It will lengthen the recovery time.... (If graceful shutdown is your goal; when power is restored, you want the UPS to FIRST recharge enough so it can again gracefully shutdown, when the power turns out to be back up for just a minute or two....thus you delay restarting the load.) -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433