Remote fencing with the IP Power 9258

Photo: IP Power 9258

A little while ago, I picked up one of these units on eBay for around $125USD. I needed something that was slightly cheaper than the regular range of higher-end APC Masterswitch and had heard that this was an embedded Linux device. It is (though that doesn’t excuse the horrific web UI). This afternoon, I setup a new Real Time kernel test box and decided to get the fencing done right this time around – so I wrote a simple script. It allows one to do a few simple things: power on, power off, and report status:

[jcm@perihelion ~]$ ippower
Usage: ippower <status> | <target> <command>

TARGETS: perihelion apohelion power5 light
COMMANDS: on off status

[jcm@perihelion ~]$ ippower status
perihelion: on
apohelion: off
power5: off
light: off
[jcm@perihelion ~]$ ippower apohelion on
on
[jcm@perihelion ~]$ ippower apohelion on
unchanged
[jcm@perihelion ~]$ ippower apohelion off
off
[jcm@perihelion ~]$ ippower status
perihelion: on
apohelion: off
power5: off
light: off

You can download my ippower fencing script if you would like to use it with a similar device.

One Response to “Remote fencing with the IP Power 9258”

  1. Jon,

    I picked up this device in the assumption there would be a way to change it’s firmware. My first Google result showed your script, which works perfectly and may remove the need to hack the device at all.

    You are using features available only in bash, so I had to change the shell to /bin/bash rather than /bin/sh.

    Thanks for sharing,

    Leon.

Leave a Reply