John Penney asks for our two cents worth:

> OK, OK, been off for a week of training and a week of vacation-
>
>  UNATTENDED- No operations staff on site....
>
>  No one around, middle of night, dark, cold, fire erupts in machine
>  room....
>
>  We want box(ex) to go down like a stone....
>
>  Sorry for the bandwidth, all!

If you want a cold stone killer process, there's simply nothing better than a
quick power disconnect, no UPS, just a quick pull of the plug from the wall.
You can make this kind of process completely automatic with just a bit of
wiring that virtually an electrician can do.

We have several HP3000s here that are being run without any UPS'es. Although
we never shut them down by just yanking the cord out of the wall, nature has
done it for us a couple dozen times. So far, we've never encountered any data
corruption that we can tell. While it's certainly not the recommended
shutdown path, it's also obviously not lethal to the HP3000 or its data.

My recommendation is to have an electrician wire up a box that has an
electrical relay in it, wired essentially as an extension cord. You would
plug your HP3000 into this new box, while the cord from the new box would
plug into your UPS. In this manner, your HP3000 would be on UPS power for
normal power fails.

The relay would be wired so that the contacts are normally closed, thus the
default condition would be such that if the relay were unpowered, it would be
passing power from the UPS to the HP3000. This is obviously the way you want
it work. The HP3000 would continue to work in the presence of a normal power
failure. But, if the relay were powered by an external signal, such as that
from a fire alarm, it would break the contacts and depower the HP3000
instantly for as long as the signal from the fire alarm were present. And the
entire process could be made to keep power away from the HP3000 if you used a
mechanical latching relay, where once tripped, it stays in that condition
until mechanically reset.

The result would be a stone cold dead HP3000, apparently meeting your
specifications.

Wirt Atmar

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