[Nut-upsdev] Asking hard questions about the NUT architecture

[Eric S. Raymond]

Ronald Reed <rreed at ops.sgp.arm.gov>:
> Yes, they make noise. But when they are on the other side of the planet, 
> in a room where no one is going to hear it, what good does a little 
> beeping do?

If they're on the other side of the planet, what good does a
*notification* do? :-) It's not like you're going to be able to
parachute someone in until well after the battery drains.  If what you
want is just remote is-it-alive monitoring, ping is your friend.

I'm not (just) being snarky.  You seem to be kind of wobbling back
and forth between use cases for UPS-controlled shutdown and
remote alerts.  I agree that both actually have use cases, but
the cases for one don't support the other very well.

> You keep talking like the system keeps going for a short time when the 
> power fails.

Yes, the systems I administer have been behaving that way since the
mid-1980s (except that it never worked on the ISA boxes).  It's a
*really* short time, like on the order of 250ms, but enough for buffer
flushes.  If that weren't so, ext3-like file systems couldn't achieve
their main purpose.  Heck, if that weren't so disk drives wouldn't
be able to autopark their heads.

> NUT is designed for servers and such. If it doesn't fill your needs, why 
> don't you create your own project for the single end-user crowd.

Basically because I don't want to fork the driver codebase.  That would
be silly -- the driver design is fit for purpose.  It's the stuff above
that layer I'm questioning.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>