Power down before outages

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Revision as of 22:04, 28 October 2018 by Dkvart17 (talk | contribs)
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Name of Task: Power down before outages

People Involved: Craig Earley, Davit Kvartskhava

Date Started: June 5, 2018 (or thereabouts)

Deadline:

Description:

After a hard crash in June 2018, we want to have a program that powers down our servers gracefully after we switch to battery power. The program APCUPSD should be helpful.

Phase 1

APCUPSD is installed and works. It does not yet interface with our hardware.

We have useful SNMP codes as well, which can be helpful in getting information.

Some notes scraped from a Google Drive Doc:

  • Decided we’ll use the current UPS info and adapt later if needed
  • Send message to ask machines to initiate shutdown
  • Apcupsd: need some more info to actually connect to the UPS, but the software runs on shinken

Phase 2 - current status

We've decided to take a different approach to fulfill this project.

  • Decided not to use APCUPSD even though it is a great software for controlling the UPS. The wide range of functionality that it offers is simply not needed. We just need to get the info about the current battery level.
  • The current battery level can be extracted through SNMP.
  • Another important aspect: In the sake of a good network design and particularly, robustness, we determined that it is better not to have a centralized system that asks other machines to initiate the shutdown. Instead, each machine will make a decision on their own, based on the level of the battery of the UPS that they extracted.
  • Each machine will run a python file periodically


Helpful sources

Date Last Updated:' August 1, 2018