Photo: APC Masterswitch Plus (with an AP9606)
As I mentioned before, I’ve been fencing most of my home/office systems (and even lights) these days. The problem is that cheaper power switches like the IP Power 9258 can be damaged quite easily. Two of mine have failed under a particular load element and I’m not saying in that case that it’s not my fault (I still like those units), but it’s clear that having something more “household name” can be a good idea. So I looked on ebay and discovered that old APC Masterswitches now often go for similar money to other more expensive kit.
I bought an 8-port Masterswitch Plus (with an AP9606) this week. Previously these went for up to $1000, but can now be had for even a tenth of that much. And they do telnet/SNMP (and ssh, if you upgrade them – not so much of a concern in this particular out-of-band configuration). I looked around for fencing scripts and obviously found the Red Hat Cluster Suite fence_apc stuff but I don’t want to install lots of stuff, and I don’t want to talk over telnet if I’ve got a private SNMP community configured and am reasonably comfortable with that. So I updated my previous script to talk to APC Masterswitch units.
APC Masterswitch Plus (with an AP9606) fencing script.
Jon.