PDU recommendations

Mon Jun 24 00:57:47 UTC 2013

I also have had good experience with (used) servertech/century/power 
tower (I think all the same brand)  -  very inexpensive;  if you are in 
santa clara I have some spare 2u 16 port 208v (20a/c19) units.

Here is something a buddy wrote up when we were wiring them to the 
user-accessable power on/off menu:

http://blog.prgmr.com/xenophobia/2012/02/notes-on-setting-up-a-sentry-p.html

My new rack is all avocent PM3001-401 units.    Used, of course;  but 
the feature I was after was per-port power monitoring.

I haven't quite gotten 'em all the way figured out yet.   One thing I 
see as a negative (but might be positive?) is that they have fuses, not 
breakers.    I don't know if this provides better protection;  I do know 
that when my buddy overloaded one of them in testing, I had to replace 
fuses, rather than just switching a breaker back.   (also, when a 
different buddy plugged a ancient desktop (so old the PSU wasn't 
auto-switch)  with the power input switch set to 110 in, it blew some of 
the fuses in the PDU (and took out the rack)  - it didn't damage any of 
the other servers on the pdu (other than taking out the PDU;  but 
everything came back up when I swapped it with my spare.)

Also note, uh, the servertech and the avocent and I think all the other 
PDUs I've seen can reboot the management interface without flipping the 
outlets.  I did it a bunch when I was getting familiar with the avocent.

Yeah.  I think I need to give fewer buddies access to production.

Nobody takes hardware seriously enough.  I can find people I trust with 
root, and that trust doesn't seem misplaced.    But I let them touch the 
hardware?  and they fuck it up.    So I end up doing almost all the 
hardware stuff myself.

On 06/23/2013 04:48 PM, Trey Valenta wrote:
> I'll also throw out recommendations for ServTech PDUs. They have an affordable line of PDUs with static transfer switches that are particularly attractive for all your single-power-supply devices.