Here's answer from smartupstools author, Russell Kroll .. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1999 01:04:50 -0600 From: Russell Kroll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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.
