I’m sure many here are familiar with or using/have used devices to remotely power cycle equipment. I’m considering a Dataprobe iBoot-G2 and am curious if you’ve had experience with it, or other recommendations.
I only need one outlet to be remotely power cycle-able. I have one piece of equipment that is occasionally a little flaky and, well, you know the hassle.
What do people recommend? There seem to be plenty out there which are more designed to auto-reboot when Internet connectivity is lost, aka remotely reboot the ‘ol cable modem for instance, but that’s not my scenario.
Def can't recommend the AP9211s enough to people needing remote power control. You should be able to put the more modern AP961X series of cards in it as well. The AP9617 is the basic module, the 9619 has environmental monitoring, and the 9618 has both the environmental stuff plus an analog modem.
The management modules can be reloaded with various types of firmware to make them compatible with everything from the rack mount PDUs to Symmetras and the run of the mill desktop or rack mount UPSs.
Third for the APC9211, though I’ll add that you might “think” you only want one outlet now, but once you have the ability you will invariably want to control more
2 feed 220v/30a going into:
2 x ATS AP4431 \(an older version\) feeding:
2 x AP7941 \- Manageable
21 x C13 \- per AP \- for the devices\.
2 x C19 going into:
2 x ATS AP7723 \- Monitorable
8 x C13 \- per AP \- For servers \(with ILO/iDRAC\) with single power supplies\.
1 feed 110v/15a going into:
Some APC\(?\) rackmount UPS
1 x AP7920B \(an older version of it\) \- Manageable
For device like OOB Modem, Server\.\.\.
All used, with spares, for under 2k\.
Its too bad for APC for making such sturdy devices and providing award winning documentation =D
BOM for new:
AP4431 \-> $1275
AP7941 \-> AP8941 \-> $1000
AP7723 \-> AP4434 \-> $1050
AP7920B \- $579
Total: \~$7230
Which is pretty good considering\. PS: Check if the Mgmt Card is included at that price\.
Caution:
1. DO NOT put any infrastructure interfaces on the net; put them behind a high grade (2FA | Certificate+TLS) VPN access;
I saw so many, so called PCI Certified, clients do it\.\.\.
2\. And remember to not go over 24A total or you may turn a breaker to dust\.
3\. It is not optimal because of the 110v but we had it\.\.\.
Various APC-rackmountable equipment. They come in all sorts of sizes and capacity.
C13/C19, single breaker, dual feed/breaker, 19" rackmount, 0 HE vertical rackmount in the back. They have a web/snmp/telnet interface, separate account management, so very easy to control.
Delayed power-on per outlet options after an outage so you won't peak/blow your main breakers is an important one as well.
I've worked with APC, Synaccess, and a couple other brands of power controllers. One constant: the IP stack implementations tend to be a bit fragile. This is not restricted to power controllers; I have a GPS NTP appliance that is affected by the same sorts of things.
I'll stick with APC and Synaccess, because I currently work with those. You want to avoid presenting these conditions to the embedded stack:
1. ARP storms
2. Lots of layer 2 and layer 3 broadcast traffic
3. Probes for ports not implemented in the stack
4. Too much traffic (SNMP in particular)
I like keeping all such devices on a single management VLAN dedicated to embedded-stack devices. The Ethernet hardware tends to be competent at filtering packets not intended for the device, so you don't have to go overboard with VLANs. It's the software behind the hardware that is easy to overwhelm if you throw too many packets at it.
In particular, if at all possible, do not use the AP9606 era cards with the APCs. They are 10BaseT and take fragile to a whole new level. I usually have to manually force the port to 10 on the switch or put it on a cheap dumb older switch.
The 961X series is 100BaseT and somewhat less temperamental.
Personally, I've not run into THAT problem in years. What I have run into is when you have a 10base-T target and you connect it to a 100base-T (or faster) infrastructure, the switch as part of the rate changing will tend to flood the poor embedded stack if your application layer isn't very, very careful to space out packets.
At best your embedded-stack device will lose packets. At worst, you will have to power-cycle the poor dear in order to get it to start listening to the network again.
Let me repeat, this observation is not restricted to the AP9606 cards; it seems to be an issue with embedded-stack devices in general.
Subject change: one other thing about the AP9606 cards: they have a battery on them, and you do have to change that battery every decade or so...
If rack-mount is not a hard requirement, I would definitely look into Ubiquiti’s mPower range. You will find anything from a single socket (WiFi only) to a 6 socket PDU (WiFi and Ethernet, probably 8 sockets for US but I’m in Europe) with central management system (free) and detailed consumption graphs and costs if you provide the kWh cost.
I’m running many of those with the controller/management software installed remotely in a central location and have several alerts and automation scripts setup when consumption goes beyond a certain level (meaning the equipment has crashed).
I want to love these, but I’ve had enough problems (3 bad units, one 8 port wiped it’s config and reset itself) causing outages, out of the 6 or so devices I’ve deployed, to ever use them in a critical production role.
I had more or less the same experience with APC Masterswitches (fried a few of those) + the included free backdoors and default admin passwords and write communities (I got my whole platform shutdown by someone once). I guess YMMV.
Good point, and important reminder to segment! None of this stuff is to be considered secure. Don’t feel bad, I left a box I’d just put a fresh slackware install on, this was perhaps 2000 or 1999 too keep in mind, anyway I left it running with a public IP and no root password. For an hour. Came back from lunch to finish the install and it was already hacked.
MFI was abandoned by ubnt some time ago. I've got a few of their environmental monitoring devices from that line in place and wouldn't really recommend any of it. The controller software is flakey, finicky, and hasn't been updated in years.
