you can has AP9211/9606

I’ve long been a fan of of the discontinued APC AP9211 distribution unit. To wit:

  1. It’s an efficient 1U, taking up just enough space for the 8 outlets.
  2. It is gloriously devoid of any moving parts, including noisy fans.
  3. powerman comes with scripts to manage its outlets from the command line over ethernet. Once you get used to the convenience of “powerman -c $host” you never go back.
  4. It’s common enough to easily be found on ebay.

That last point brings us to this post. Mark got a pair for his machines after I showed him the light. He got them from an auction that has 3 days left and, at the time of this writing, 19 units left. Each has a pretty reasonable price for immediate purchase with shipping.

APC MasterSwitch AP9211 w/ AP9606 Control Moduleebay auction 230196539398

It’s a chance for poor kernel developers out there to stop being frustrated by having to lose time rebooting boxes in person.

Comments (2) to “you can has AP9211/9606”

  1. We use a bunch of AP7953 for the test lab here at work… They work great too: developers can reboot their panicked test machines easily.

    At first we tried to use IPMI, but that didn’t work as well as it should for a lot of machines.

    I didn’t knew about Powerman… so I wrote an interface (GTK systray GUI -> http to the server -> expect script on the server -> APC). I’ll look into it! :)

  2. Newer APC models are OK as well, we use many ranging from AP9210 to AP7920 here. The newer models have more powerful firmware (including, for example, SSH).

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