X10 protolol

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi to all.

I am looking at using X-10 protocol within my comms room to enable a remote power reset on stuck devices (routers etc).

As this will be on a post UPS mains ring does anyone have experiance or knowledge of the X-10 protocol working in this sort of environment.

Thanks in advance

Paula

[John Bolene · Accepted solution]

Interesting thinking to use X10 power control devices for this.

X10 will work on all devices that connect to the same leg of the 110V power. 110V or 120V as it is also called, is made up of half a 220V circuit or one leg.

X10 cannot cross a transformer/UPS or get to the other leg of 110V.

Paula, I think you live in the world of 220V and I do not have any info on 220V X10 devices.

I would point you to www.x10.com and maybe they can help.

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi John

I have confirmed that with the usp environment they will work.

The plan is to put a standalone PC with the X-10 software and device running pc anywhere within the comms room.

I plan to put 8 routers on this - one test server and have 1 spare.


So for approx ??500 I can remotely power cycle a stuck router / device.

This cost is nil compared to a travel to site to turn a switch on and off.

Last Saturday we lost a router for one hour ??? estimated loss of business in excess of 10K.


Paula

[Volker Borowski]

Hmm,

a PC with pcAnywhere (or VNC or whatelse) tends to bluescreen and is an error source in itself esp. with ups-driving devices.

I had ups-devices going in "on battery" mode when the connected PC got Dr. Watsons for whatever reason.

Do not know of X10, but can it filter out such events ?

Antother option might be to use a consoleserver to access the serial port of a router/switch and initiate a reboot from there. You can get these with up to 32 serial ports in 1 19" Height Unit at http://www.cyclades.com but there are other products as well.

There are rack-control devices with 2 Unit Heigth as well, that can handle this.
Just found one at http://www.mdcomms.com.
Unfortunatly it is all in german.
I attached a picture and if you like to get some more info surf like "Produkte" and "Remote Control".

I'll bet there is a lot of similar stuff in the world. Dumb things (switching power) should be done by dumb hardware. A PC might be too complex for this, and sometimes the pcAnywhere service goes down for no reason.

Lots of pros and cons...
Volker

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Volker

I aready use a serial port connection, but once in a while the router can hang and a hard reset is required.

I run pcanywhere on win 95/98 machines and it is more stable than the NT based machines.


Danke for suggestion.

Paula

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Paula:

I would test this very carefully as X10 may have difficulty pushing the high-frequency carrier through some UPS's.

Just as a Plan B, you might consider Modem operated switches. One source for these is Blackbox Corp.


Fourier Transform Thoughts, Clay

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi
I will not be going through ups just indside a ups environment.

Paula

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi again Paula:

One more thing to think about. X10 can occasionally false trigger especially in noisy environments. This could be worse than not having a remote rebooting capability.

I think that the safer choice will be a modem operated switch. One such device can be found at: http://www.blackbox.com/faxbacks/15000/15640.PDF

It comes in both 120VAC and 220VAC models and can be activated by a modem or even a pager.
This covers the case when then network is down. With a little work, you could even configure an IT/O handler to monitor your devices and take the appropriate action.

More Fourier Transform Thoughts, Clay