One UPS, several servers - shutdown script?

[theeldergeek]

We have some APC UPS's running 24×7 which power a bunch of servers running Server 2008 R2.

 

Each UPS only has the option for one USB cable to be connected to a device, but there is more than one device being powered on each UPS. This means, as far as I can tell, only one device can be shut down by the UPS in the event of a power failure.

 

We could purchase additional expansion cards and go down the network management route, however we didn’t really want to pay hundreds of pounds just for this privilege. We'd need 11 of these things, at an approx cost of £170 each...

 

I've Googled this problem, and see it has real potential to be done, but I'm afraid I'm not into scripting by any means, so much of it is over my head. The aim is obviously to get the UPS to shut down the directly connected machine in the event of a power failure, but for the machine shutting down to also send out a command (batch file?) to other servers instructing them to shut down as well.

 

Can anyone point me to a working model of this sort of set up, or help in putting something together?

 

Thanks in advance.

[3s-gtech]

Apparently APC have software for this (for free I think!) but I use apcupsd to manage this. The other servers talk to the USB connected one over the network, and receive the UPS status from them. The settings file is created, then just copied across to each server when installing. Works well.

[glennda]

You install the software on one device and then set a batch script - on power fail run a script (switches need to be on ups)

 

Shutdown -f -r -t 01 -m \\machinename