using a mac to powerdown a PC

[Greebazoid]

I live in a city with terrible (truly) power - its up and down like a yoyo, and when its there, it seldom actually at the voltage it should be at..

So. The two macs in the house are safely sitting behind APC UPS's, but now there is a Windoze 2003 Server in the house as well, and I aint dropping more dosh on another UPS for it. The UPS on my mini is an 800VA UPS, so quite capable of holding both the PC and the mini up long enough to shutdown, trouble is, only one of them can be told to shutdown by the UPS.

Sooo. Does anyone know how, from my Mac, I can automate a shutdown command to a windows 2003 server when the Mac receives the notification from the UPS. Obviously, the machines can see each other on the network (switches and routers also on UPSs so even during a blackout, the Mac and PC will still comms.)

I have, in the interim, set the drives and raid controllers on the PC to not use caching, so at least I wont have data loss.

Ideas?

 

[MisterMe]

Its a server, for God's sake. You ought to protect it with a UPS even if your city had excellent power. In a city with bad power, it's a no-brainer. Certain do not leave your server at the mercy of one of the clients. Get the UPS!

 

[joecool85]

Get a cheap UPS from geeks.com, thats what I did.

 

[Greebazoid]

you're right - its a server, but I also have an 800VA UPS feeding a teeny weeeny mac mini... and my mac is far more important to me than a server..

See, I didnt mention the server is on its way out - the data will be migrated to a RAID-1 volume on my mini - and then rebuilt as a game's PC.

So dropping extra cash on it now is daft.

Besides, its a cool thing to try dontchafink?

 

[ImNoSuperMan]

A bit off the topic. But I was really wondering bout this yesterday. Why not put a really small battery inside the mini(may be BTO). I was thinking of getting a mini for my elder bro. He doesnt even know that sucha thing really exist. He`s interested in Macs from the day I told him that Macs are virus proof. He doesnt need a portable. Neither an iMac will do coz of space constraints on his office table.

Now I m in INDIA and power cuts are very common. So I`ll definitely need a UPS for the mini. But the mini wont really be all that portable I guess coz I`ll have to move the big bulky UPS with it if I want to use it somewhere else(he already has an extra CRT monitor in his room BTW.)

Now it`ll be really great if the mini could work even for just 10-15 minutes in case of a power cut. That`d be a good enough time to either turn on the power generator or save the work and shut down the mini. Or maybe put the mini to sleep for sometime.

Atleast there should be a BTO option for this battery.


BTW. I second MisterMe and joecool85. Get n extra UPS. They are so cheap nowadays.

 

[simon-says]

I don't know if Windows has anything like this, but you could try to write an Applescript that would telnet into the Windows machine and runs a shutdown command. I don't know if this command exists in windows, I'm just familiar with a *NIX environment with the `shutdown` command.

 

[balamw]

samba (built in to your OS X) install should allow you to do this with the "net" command http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man8/net.8.html it goes something like this

net shutdown \\\\XPSERVER -WWORKGROUP -UUSERNAME

B

 

[Sirin]

*

 

[darkfro]

If you want to shut it down quickly you could always do

net shutdown -f \\\\XPSERVER -WWORKGROUP -UUSERNAME

or if you want to time it

net shutdown -t xx \\\\XPSERVER -WWORKGROUP -UUSERNAME
where xx is the time in seconds.

 

[Greebazoid]

Great help

Thanks guys - this is helpful stuff indeed.

Anyone know how I can persuade OS X to recognise the warning event from the APC UPS?

Another suggestion has been to daisy chain the UPS feed from the UPS into both the PC and the mac..

not so sure about that tho.

 

[balamw]

Thanks guys - this is helpful stuff indeed.

Anyone know how I can persuade OS X to recognise the warning event from the APC UPS?

Another suggestion has been to daisy chain the UPS feed from the UPS into both the PC and the mac..

not so sure about that tho.

On Windows at least these kinds of things can be configured in PowerChute, so maybe the Mac version can too.

http://www.apc.com/tools/download/software_comp.cfm?sw_sku=SFPCPE134&id=129&family=&part_num=&swfam=129&tsk=

Is it Serial or USB? If USB don't even think about daisy chaining, if serial, you might possibly get away with it, but I wouldn't risk it...

B