[CentOS] Power Fail Protection Update

Wed Aug 16 18:31:23 UTC 2017
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

On 8/16/2017 7:49 AM, Chris Olson wrote:
> Many thanks to those that responded to my original posting with
> information about Network UPS Tools and commercial UPS products.
>
> In our planning a path forward to implement UPS-based power fail
> protection, we have come across what appears to be an issue with
> the state of the CentOS 6 machines being UPS protected.  Most of
> these machines are desktop/deskside machines that are likely to
> be idle during non-work hours.  It is also likely that they will
> be hibernating or in a power save mode.
>
> In the power save mode, these machines do not respond to keyboard
> or mouse activity.  They also do not respond to network traffic
> such as a ping from other systems on the network.  The method we
> use to wake them up is a quick push on the power button when the
> hibernation state is indicated by the button's yellow LED display.
>
> This state of hibernation leaves us wondering if these systems will
> be able to respond to network messages sent by the UPS.  We have not
> yet made it all the way through the NUT and UPS documentation.
> The hibernation answer may very well be therein, but we have not
> found it so far.  Any help or direction regarding the hibernation
> issue as it relates to UPS power fail protection will be appreciated.


in general, there's two power save states, 'Standby' aka 'Sleep', where 
the system state is held in RAM, but the CPU and peripherals is shut 
down and sleeping, and "Hibernate" where the ram is saved to disk and 
the system is completely powered down.

In sleep, if the power is lost, then you'll need to reboot when the 
power comes back up.   The system is using very little power, so your 
UPS should last much longer.

In hibernate, you can restore when the power returns. Hibernate, 
however, takes a few more seconds to wakeup, so people often use Sleep 
as it wakes up relatively instantly.

In neither of these states will the system be able to listen to ANY 
network traffic, as the processor is simply not running.   The one 
exception is Wake-On-Lan aka WoL.    You probably COULD configure a 
master always-on NUT box to send WoL to a list of such systems, wait a 
suitable amount of time for them to come back to their senses, then send 
them Hibernate commands via NUT.

Utilizing WoL requires configuration on the target hardware to recognize 
and accept the WoL, this is typically done at the BIOS level, and only 
works if the system supports WoL in the first place.   WoL commands can 
typically only be sent over the same local network segment, as they are 
layer 2 packets sent to the MAC address of the target.



-- 
john r pierce, recycling bits in santa cruz