Nut upsuser - Oct 2005 - Dry-joint to serial converter for use with NUT

Hi All,

This is my first post to this list so please forgive me if this topic has been
mentioned before (I had a short browse of the last few months and didn't
find anything)

My Questions - with a little bit of info about our setup first 

We have just purchased a pair of MGE Galaxy 3000 UPS's and have them all
ready to go in a parallel configuration. The NUT compatibility doco seems to
suggest that the NUT SNMP drivers for the Galaxy 3000 are still being trailed
but that the serial drives for the Galaxy series are supported.  That's fine
because we're quite content to use a serial link between the UPS's and
the nutd server.  The install of the UPS's has been accompanied by a
complete refurbishment of our power distribution systems and we are presently
considering better ways of achieving user-initiated emergency shutdown of the
whole computer room.   It occurred to us that a neat way to achieve a smart
emergency shutdown of the computer room (instead of simply cutting the power at
the distribution panel) would be to implement a "virtual" UPS
interface alongside the two Galaxy 3000 interfaces.  In other words - our plan
is to set up a button outside the computer room that sends an "on battery -
initiate shutdown" serial signal to nutd which is monitoring it as a third
"Virtual" UPS using a standard NUT Galaxy series serial driver.  The
shutdown rules for this virtual UPS would be much more urgent than those
configured for the galaxy UPS (i.e. no lead time etc).  so my questions are
these.

1) Is this a good idea?  (i.e. Are there any pitfalls with this approach? -  or
can emergency shutdown be done more elegantly another way?)

2) Does anyone know of a dry-joint to serial interface module (i.e. a curcuit
that allows the connection of two wires to result in a configurable serial
interface output).  Ideally a commercial solution would be best as it would
obviate a heap of testing.

3) Any other comments 

In advance,  Thanks!

Damon Pullen
DIER (Tasmania)