So with the new ESXI box came another upgrade to the “server room”. This upgrade comes about for a couple of reasons. Firstly I wanted to know how much power things were actually using when they were doing things (part of the reason for ESXI on a Xeon-D is to do more with less power). Secondly I wanted to be able to remotely turn on and off the power to devices.
Now turning the power on and off remotely may sound like something you’d not really need, but my original pfSense box would always hang on reboot (when upgrading, or just rebooted for whatever reason) and the new X10SDV mobo has an interesting bug when using certain NVMe M.2 SSDs which means you need to kill the power to the mobo to make the SSD visible again (see https://tinkertry.com/supermicro-superserver-bios-change-can-cause-960-pro-and-evo-to-hide-heres-the-fix). So I was kind of keen.
Looking about at options the usual APC kit is really quite pricey and more than I’d be willing to pay. There are some single port type options that look a bit homebrew and none of those took my fancy. Then I came across Ubiquiti’s mPower series. Two issues with mPower stuff though, its only available with US or Euro sockets and its also been discontinued by Ubiquiti.
The former can easily be sorted. Euro kettle leads are 99p on eBay, and if you need to plug in a 12v PSU type thing a travel adapter is also 99p on eBay (or in Poundstrecher). That its been discontinued by Ubiquiti turns out to a good thing. Why? Well because you can pick the devices up pretty cheaply. I got a 6way strip, the one with ethernet on-board, for £37 at LinITX. Bargain. The mFi software is still available from Ubiquiti too, but use Google to find it ‘cos you won’t find it in Ubiquiti’s site menus anymore.
The trouble with older software though is its not been updated for modern libraries and versions. The Mac app “just works”, but I don’t leave my Mac on all the time. I wanted to make the Linux version work. My Linux box is running Centos 7, so thats default Java 8 and MongoDB 2.6. mFi wants Java 7 and MongoDB 2.4. Java 7 is a simple yum install. MonogoDB just needs some hunting down in the MonogoDB reporisories to download the last 2.4 series release which you can then install manually. Then you have to fart about with Java keystores, but that done, the mFi software works great.
You don’t actually need the mFi software though. The power strip itself will grab an IP from DHCP (so stick a fixed DHCP assignment on your DHCP server for it) and you can just connect to it over http to see power use and turns off/on the individual sockets. £37 well spent.
Since I have the mFi software running fine I’ve not really investigated playing about with the mPower strip. It runs an embedded Linux distro itself, so appears to be ripe for some hackery if thats your thing. Maybe one day.
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