Summary: Server shutdown at power outage

Dear manger,

thanks to all the useful responses.

> we have a bunch of Sun Fire 240 - UPS APC 750 - combos. I know that
> somehow
> the UPS can inform the server about a power outage and shut it down,
> but the
> APC documentation does not tell us anything about Solaris
> (dcoumentation for
> windows only) so we have not implemented that yet.
> Any pointers (how to)?
>
> Our other idea was to write a simple C-program that analizes the ouput
> of
> "prtdiag -v" and issues a "shutdown -g 1" if one of the power suppliers
> signals a power outage. This is no big deal but if anybody has already
> done
> that or even has a better idea...


A while back (10 years) I looked into this.  If I remember right there
are 2 kinds of protocols.  One uses the dcd to tell you that the power
dropped, the other sends a bit on the rts.
***
http://www.networkupstools.org/

This package has been built on Solaris and several other Unix flavours
and the APC setup details are included. We use this package to monitor
an APC UPS via the serial port on a Linux system. The same should be
possible on Solaris systems.

We don't actually use it to shutdown systems since they are on a
separate UPS/backup generator system. We use it with Nagios and other
component software to SMS administrators.
***
You may want to try the following:

http://www.apc.com/tools/download/software_comp.cfm?sw_sku=SFPCBE704

Power Chute for Solaris 8 and 9 may work with your UPS.
***
APC has PowerChute Business Edition for Solaris 8 and 9.
If you have the appropriate APC cable connecting the UPS
monitoring port to a serial port on the Sun, then the UPS
can tell PowerChute the status of power, the status of
batteries, and other info.
I've used older versions of PowerChute (particularly 5.x)
on Solaris 7-9 with no problems.  I liked the old version
as it was self contained.  The new one has an agent on
each workstation, but uses an MS windows based management
tool.

If you want an open source solution, download and build
Network UPS Tools from
  http://www.networkupstools.org
I've used this package to manage SmartUPS 700 and SmartUPS
1400 units supporting Slackware Linux workstations and it
is quite flexible and very good at extracting information from
the UPS.
***
you can find at http://www.apcupsd.org/ source of UPS software for APC,
seem to be for linux perhaps simple to adapt for Solaris...
***
The serial cable you received is not a standard serial cable. The pin
arrangement is different, so you have to use this on the serial port
connections for operation.  Don't throw it away or try to replace it
with a standard serial cable.

As I remember, you can download the necessary instructions and software
with examples directly from the American Power Conversion web site
"www.apc.com".  There you can select Germany and German instructions,
etc.  There is also some info on the disk, that came with the unit
regarding setup for UNIX machines.

Hope this helped.  That UPS saved some Oracle data a couple of times
for us, before we installed the main UPS for the entire cpu room.
***
try it with the APC PowerChute Business Edition Basic Software for
Solaris from APC.

http://www.apcc.com/tools/download
***
Check out Apcupsd at
http://www.apcupsd.org/
It's open-source and is in use on Solaris Systems .
***
There is also another method,

APCUPSD

It is an open source program to handle UPS shutdown events.
***

Regards,

   Andreas
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