[Nut-upsdev] Idea: UPS id via powerline broadcast

[Stuart D Gathman]

The problem:

We maintain small servers in customer offices.  Customers often get
confused when asked to plug the server into the UPS.  Sometimes they
have multiple servers from different vendors, and multiple UPSs, and
plug our server into the wrong UPS.  The end result is that the UPS
being monitored with NUT is often *not* the UPS the server is actually
plugged into.

A solution:

There is a set of X10 gadgets that respond to commands broadcast over
home powerlines with up to 16 addresses.  A UPS could use a similar
protocol to broadcast a 48 or 64 bit ID (similar to a MAC) over the
power cords plugged into it.   A computer could have a detector built in
(or even added on via USB and a POWER socket insert - but a customer
could probably figure out a way to mess that up also).  When the
built-in detector sees the UPS ID you are expecting, you know that the
server is plugged into the correct UPS.  If you see no ID or the wrong
ID, you know that it is plugged into something else.