thing like what follows. What is important is that you get the information from an ether cable over the network and you must specify the address of a “NIS server” that is running NIS (not the Master/Slave networking de- scribed above). The NIS slave apcupsd will then poll the NIS server at the NETTIME interval you specify to obtain the status.

Here are a few words from Adam Kropelin concerning the difference between the Master/Slave networking and the NIS-based networking:

Think of the difference as push (Master/Slave) vs. pull (NIS-based). In the case of M/S, the master makes all the shutdown decisions and notifies the slaves when they are to shut down or when some other interesting event happens. The slaves just do whatever the master says, whenever the master says to. On the other hand, with the NIS-based network config you basically “publish” the UPS status from one server and then your clients view that status and make their own decisions.

Personally, I like the NIS-based approach because the master knows nothing about the slaves, thus there are fewer configuration files to keep in sync. I also like the flexibility of allowing each slave to make its own decision on when to shut down; some of my old clunker servers take quite a long while to shut down. There are problems reported occasionally with the M/S approach, where slaves sometimes lose contact with the master or vice- versa. I know improvements have been made in that code, but I still like the simplicity of using NIS.

Another thing to think about is how you feel about running a network service like NIS on your firewall. My network is set up almost identically to yours and I chose to run the apcupsd “master” on a server in the DMZ and have the firewall just be a client of it. That way I don’t have to run NIS on the firewall apcupsd instance.

## apcupsd.conf v1.1 ## UPSCABLE ether UPSTYPE net

LOCKFILE /var/lock

DEVICE server-network-address:3551 UPSCLASS standalone

UPSMODE disable NETTIME 10

where on the DEVICE directive you replace the server-network-address with the fully qualified domain name or IP address of a machine running apcupsd with NIS enabled (and normally, but not required, connected to a

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APC UPS control system manual Upsmode disable Nettime

UPS control system specifications

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