tsarna@endicor.com (Ty Sarna) writes:
> did anyone else notice that the textual user/group ids in the tarfile
> are "amiga"?), 

Yea, kinda funny.  I wonder if we can get them to change it to
"netbsd" ;-)

> it doesn't look like their UPS's are quite as smart as
> the APCs (what's been publicly figured out about APC covers about as
> much, I think), but it's all the important stuff, anyway.

I'm trying to think of what is really missing in the BEST interface.
It looks like they have all the basic peices.

> Next thought: it'd be nice to come up with a generic UPS daemon
> interface with standard support for network shutdowns (The big
> 2200VA unit here supports 5 machines... I want all of them shut down,
> not just the one that's serial-connected!).

I'm thinking of writing a multicast based power daemon that either
multicast "We are on-line and all is well", "We are on batteries and
the battery capacity is now nn%" or "We have set the scuttling charges
and the UPS will shut down in N minutes."

I believe that the daemon, once it announces the intention to shut the
ups down must really shut the ups down.  There is otherwise a deadlock
possiblility where some computers have already shut down and won't
hear any possible "Oops, power just came back.  I was only joking
about the shutdown."

I wonder, how hard it would be to spin the disks down on a shutdown?
Some disks are real power hogs.  

In theory some motherboards and power supplies even let one go into a
power off shutdown.  The last time I tried turning on the bios's APM
on my Intel Venus PPRO board it caused netbsd to hang after a few
hours.  This was a few months ago so things might have changed by now.

-wolfgang