Received the IP power switch I bought on EBay yesterday. Even though the docs are not very well translated I was able to get it running in fairly short order. It came setup to issue a DHCP request so I was able to connect to it right away. I turned off the DHCP request and assigned a static IP on my LAN as I was anticipating being able to shut down the server at night.
Thats when I discovered 2 problems.
Problem 1
Seems that if you set the ‘restart on power fail’ setting in the energy control panel it will be ignored if you issue a shutdown command. Evidently, the idea is if you are shutting down via command you do not want the system to be powering up again by itself. While I can see the point of this there should be a way to leave the PMU setting alone if you want the power up to restart the machine.
And indeed, it seems Leopard shutdown has added a -u option to do just that but since I am running Tiger I ill have to see if I can do this another way. Maybe I will grab the Darwin sources for shutdown and see if it can leave the PMU alone.
Problem 2
Since I am using the other XServe’s basically as storage devices I had anticipated being able to just set the boot-command in Open Firmware to target-mode and I could then use the IP power switch to turn units on and off as I pleased and they would fire up in target disk mode. But, it turns out the PMU is not set properly and I either have to figure out how to set the PMU from Open Firmware or install OSX on a hard drive and bring each unit up just to set the PMU bit then yank the power so it stays set.
