[Nut-upsuser] ordered shutdown

[Gabor Gombas]

On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 08:12:43PM +0100, Arjen de Korte wrote:

> With whatever strategy you use, you need to be able to send some kind  
> of command (power on, WOL magic, whatever) at the right time. Shutting  
> down is 'easy' when there is one point in time where you can decide to  
> shutdown whatever is connected (what we have now) possibly with some  
> kind of sequencing and then power cycle the UPS. What people are  
> asking now, is to have multiple decision moments and for each one you  
> must guarantee that you're able to return to the normal state with as  
> little impact on other systems. This is something completely different.

The first step would be to have a _central_ way to manage when to shut a
specific class of clients down. Having to muck with upssched scripts on
every client just does not scale. IMHO the clients should just say
"hello, I'm of class X" when logging into the UPS, and it should be
upsd's job to say "clients of class X start to shut down NOW, everyone
else wait".

Being able to turn clients that were logged in to the UPS when their
shutdown was ordered back on is the next logical step after the above,
but for a start I'd be happy with the shutdown part.

> In that case, put these scripts on a network drive. They don't have to  
> live in /etc/ups (or whatever is compiled in). In networked  
> environments with lots of similar systems it is much more convenient  
> to do this on a NFS share.

I'm not really willing to allow NFS on every network where I do allow
upsmon connections...

Note: I'm not saying that it cannot be hacked together somehow. There
are people who like the DIY approach and build their own computers,
cars, houses etc. But most people would just want to get something that
Just Works. Nut IMHO is now quite mature at low-level functionality, it
would be really nice to build higher level functionality on top of
that, and not require everyone to re-invent to wheel if they have
more complex requirements.

Gabor

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     MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
                Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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