The problem: We maintain small servers in customer offices. Customers often get confused when asked to plug the server into the UPS. Sometimes they have multiple servers from different vendors, and multiple UPSs, and plug our server into the wrong UPS. The end result is that the UPS being monitored with NUT is often *not* the UPS the server is actually plugged into.
A solution: There is a set of X10 gadgets that respond to commands broadcast over home powerlines with up to 16 addresses. A UPS could use a similar protocol to broadcast a 48 or 64 bit ID (similar to a MAC) over the power cords plugged into it. A computer could have a detector built in (or even added on via USB and a POWER socket insert - but a customer could probably figure out a way to mess that up also). When the built-in detector sees the UPS ID you are expecting, you know that the server is plugged into the correct UPS. If you see no ID or the wrong ID, you know that it is plugged into something else. _______________________________________________ Nut-upsdev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nut-upsdev
