ericbo / apc-ipmi-monitor

A python script that polls data from an APC branded UPS to automate the shutdown of bare metal servers.

ericbo/apc-ipmi-monitor

WARNING! This is just a prof of concept I created during some free time. It is not in a state were I would use it in my own homelab yet.

A tool designed for non enterprise APC branded UPS's. This will allow you to define many IPMI devices across your network and will trigger a graceful shutdown on all servers in the event there is an extended power outage.

Getting Started

In the system that will be directly interfacing with the APC UPS, you must have apcupsd and ipmitool installed. On Ubuntu, this can be installed with the following commands:

sudo apt-get -y install apcupsd
sudo apt-get -y install ipmitool

Running apcupsd

For this script to monitor the status of your APC battery apcupsd must be running. Assuming you are using an APC with a single USB connection, make sure UPSCABLE and UPSTYPE are both set to usb in your /etc/apcupsd/apcupsd.conf file. I would also suggest commenting out DEVICE /dev/ttyS0. Example:

## apcupsd.conf v1.1 ##
...
UPSCABLE usb
...
UPSTYPE usb
...
#DEVICE /dev/ttyS0

source

Running the Monitor

You will need pip installed, specifically pip for python 3. You can then directly install this package via pypi.org by running the following:

sudo apt-get -y install python3-pip
pip3 install apc-ipmi-monitor-ericbo

Next create a simple config file with a list of your servers & credentials:

servers:
  server 1:
    hostname: 0.0.0.0
    username: ADMIN
    password: ADMIN
  server 2:
    hostname: 0.0.0.0
    username: ADMIN
    password: ADMIN
apc_shutdown_threshold:
  field: BCHARGE # Which field do you want to consider
  value: 80      # When the field dips bellow this value, all servers will shutdown

Finally you can get a quick overview of all your IPMI devices by running:

apc-ipmi-monitor monitoring server-status

Running on Startup

Finally, you will want to ensure this monitor is being ran regularly. I would suggest using systemctl or crontabs. The example bellow is a simple crontab setup. In the future there will be a full guide on setting this up with systemctl.

crontab -e

* * * * * python /home/user/upc-ipmi-tool/src/__main__.py # Run every minute