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How would you go about a multi-platform SCRAM system?


AshleyAshes
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Here at work we had a fire the other week, it was in another office in the building, it wasn't big, the sprinklers didn't even go off and the worst we dealt with was smoke coming out of the vents.  However it was a scare.  My work had become a little too comfortable with it's server room and this had already become apparent earlier.  The week before the storage server for the company, which held all the data for our projects failed.  It was an Ubuntu software RAID5 that had APPARENTLY been running in degraded mode for 18 months till it gave up the ghost.  We had to get an outside contractor to get it cooking enough to rescue the data off.  There was no loss but it was a scare.  Since then I've build two NAS4Free boxes with zraid2 and a hot spare, the primary rsyncs to the secondary every night.  Since the fire we also have the rsync going to a single drive that we can just grab and run out of the door in the event of an emergency.  So this is certainly an improvement over the previous setup.

As the fire bells were ringing me and the boss were trying to shut down the 20+ machines in our server room and kill the breakers before any sprinklers came on (Which they didn't thank goodness)  However, thinking about it this weekend I'd like to set up some sort of SCRAM system were a script can institute shutdown of all machines in our server room at once while we just worry about breakers and unplugging UPSs.  The issue here is that we run a range of platforms.

6 x Windows 7 Pro machines

13 x Windows XP x64 Pro machines

1 x Windows 2000 Advanced Server machine

2 x FreeNAS/FreeBSD machines

1 x Ubuntu machine

Kinda a mix. :P  I realize that a script that would SSH into the FreeBSD and Ubuntu machines would probably be the easiest, but I'd need some sorta program to get remote access running on the Windows machines and then get all of this cooking in one easy to launch application/script so one can fire and forget.

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That would be quite a feat to shut them all down in that manner. Considering the mix of systems in the office, I would imagine that you need a few scripts to pull it off. From my knowledge you would not be able to kill the windows machines without remote access to each one an executing shutdown /s 

A little research revealed a third party application that may suffice for your needs, though I know nothing of the software:

http://network-shutdown.com/remotely-shutdown-computers-on-network

Method 4

As for the linux systems, not sure if the software can manage those or not, but I know if someone was able to work out a way to take down an entire office easily, I would have more problems at work >_< That just screams 'bad idea' to me anyways. I understand the need to get everything offline quickly, but your office should have backup systems in place to restore the machines to different boxes in such failures. The server 2000 machine is a bit behind the times, I would suggest getting up to atleast 2k8 R2 for the backup functions alone. 

 

Edit:

Another curiosity of mine, why did you decide to use freenas? would a data share on the server be insufficient? 

Edited by Zettabit
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1. use wimpy UPSes

2. set each machine to hibernate or shut down when battery power is low

3. flip mains power switch

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But that's me. People prefer not to emulate my ideas for some reason.

If we're attempting an emergency shutdown because of a building emergency, we'd prefer the machines turn off a lot faster than it'd take for the UPS's to drain. :P

As for the linux systems, not sure if the software can manage those or not, but I know if someone was able to work out a way to take down an entire office easily, I would have more problems at work >_< That just screams 'bad idea' to me anyways. I understand the need to get everything offline quickly, but your office should have backup systems in place to restore the machines to different boxes in such failures. The server 2000 machine is a bit behind the times, I would suggest getting up to atleast 2k8 R2 for the backup functions alone. 

The Win2K system actually preforms no tasks other than as a license server for other machines.  It's basically in the situation of 'Well, it works, so why would we change it before it stopped working?'  And upgrades would mean at least a new Windows server license.  But yeah, something to give remote command line access so we could just fire down a script.  Probably something that we could password protect, not so much for 'security' but to avoid 'Oh... I accidentally clicked that batch on the desktop and... Oh uh.'

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That seems a bit overkill to need a server for that function xP 

My apologies, efficiency and simplification is what I do xD

 

Yeah generating a script for that across multiple machines is a bit beyond me, I'd say check out that software. 

Well, considder this: What's simpler and more efficent than letting the machine that does it's job keep doing it's job? :P

So, tinkering, I got the Windows Telnet server working on one of the 7Pro boxes and executing the Shutdown -S command was no challenge.  Since the other OS's all run Telnet by default, that's no challenge.  So I mostly need to execute a script that will log in and send telnet to all the machines concurrently.

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Comercial fire suppression systems nowdays use Novec1230 or Halon fire suppression systems so equipment can keep running while fire suppression is in effect. I like Novec1230, personally. I've got two systems on wooden boards that are waiting for my next shipment of the stuff, going to run fully submerged.

I assure you, this pre-war warehouse converted into office space spits out nothing but city water from it's fire suppression system.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Comercial fire suppression systems nowdays use Novec1230 or Halon fire suppression systems so equipment can keep running while fire suppression is in effect. I like Novec1230, personally. I've got two systems on wooden boards that are waiting for my next shipment of the stuff, going to run fully submerged.

no, it's entirely dependent on cost, use, maintenance and many other factors.

here's a little blurb out of a module...

20151111_015856[1].jpg

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