Re: Operate until failure

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

On Mon, 08 January 2001, Henry Yen wrote:
> And if you are running a late-model linux (preferably RedHat), you can
> download APC's own "award-winning PowerChute Plus" software for linux from
> their website.  It seems to be identical to PowerChutePlus running on
> any other platforms, except that the interface is through X86.

And what if you are not using APCs?

One issue with highly redudandent data centers is the failure modes are
"interesting."  You don't want to shutdown due to a single UPS failure, so
you don't use something simple like PowerChute Plus.  You most likely don't
want to shutdown based on any automatic signal.  However, you do want a way
for an operator to gracefully shutdown a lot of equipment quickly when
the decision is made.

For a server farm, with potentially thousands of individual systems, is
there any standard piece of software you can install on all of the systems
to act as a receiver of a signal to begin a graceful shutdown that does
not depend on a vendor's proprietary interface?  Preferabally one which
does not involve running a lot of additional wires.

I know, everyone says their systems will never fail.  Think of this
as the "else" statement for the condition which will never happen.

Again this is only needed if people want a gracefull shutdown.  If
you can live with a hard shutdown, you wouldn't require this.  If you
use ctrl-alt-del as a normal management practice, I suspect you don't
really require a graceful shutdown.