Nut upsdev - Aug 2011 - Idea: UPS id via powerline broadcast

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.

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 8:19 PM, Stuart D Gathman <stuart at bmsi.com>
wrote:
> 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.
Hmm, interesting.

There are actually a number of network-over-power-line devices that
relay entire Ethernet packets, so I wonder if there is a "lite"
version of the MAC/PHY chips which could be used to send that ID.

If the UPS and power supplies provided a full network link, the NUT
protocol could run over that as well, keeping it out of the regular
traffic on the other network interfaces. Discovery could be done with
mDNS and DNS-SD.

-- 
- Charles Lepple