[plug] ups driven automatic server shutdown

[Harry McNally]

Hi Adam

A few people have said nut but I'm not sure that it meets your requirements.

Servers running nut can "listen" to a common server over the network. The
common server is generally the one connected (via serial, USB, or simple
digital alarm signals) to a common UPS that powers all of the servers. On
receipt of an alarm from the common server (over the network) the "slave"
servers can autonomously shutdown (and you could arrange the shutdown scripts
to bring down services gracefully on that server).

But your application describes the reverse. Rather than autonomous shutdown of
the slaves, you want a central server to supervise the shutdown as a sequence.
While the alarms for each "slave" server could occur at timed intervals (nut
scripts allow this), this would rely on the shutdown of each server occurring
in a maximum time window. If you can guarantee that ..

Have a look over nut anyway. It has quite comprehensive facilities and I may
not have dug deep enough when I looked at what it can do. You may also be able
to extend what it does to minimise scripting to achieve what you need. If the
nut running on slaves can reply when all services that matter are closed, then
this might permit a VerySmallScript on the "master" server.

If 140 servers are running off a common UPS, you have a stout UPS there :P
Maybe I'm assuming the architecture incorrectly.

All the best
Harry

ps Top post be damned!

Adam Hewitt wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I am currently trying to find a good solution for the above problem. So far
> all the options I have are either a lot of development or dont go far enough
> into what I need.
> 
> What I am really after is something that can login to around 140 servers and
> shut them down based on certain criteria, ie. applications and/or services
> on a single machine need to come down in a specific order, check to make
> sure they are down, if they aren't try bringing them down two more times
> before forcefully killing the app/service. Once the server is brought down
> the shutdown controller needs to check that it is uncontactable before
> moving onto the next server. The servers need to have dependencies put next
> to them in order for the controller to shut them down in a specific order.
> 
> I know I can do this on a linux server getting the results via snmp from the
> UPS (as well as environmental alarms and or serial access to a power circuit
> relay) and then use perl scripts to do the actual shutdown, however its more
> work than I wanted to do and I was kind of hoping for a commercial solution
> that can do the same thing using shutdown clients on each machine [ or
> similar ]. I would really like the server to run on linux as we all know
> Windows shouldn't be trusted to conduct such a sensitive task.
> 
> Anyone have any ideas?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Adam.
> 
> 
> 
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