Automated power on/off

Credits

This section was inspired by Trevorn.eth's work: Protecting your Rocketpool node from power outages on the cheap and my adaptation attempts to generalise the automatic power down/up setup.

Disclaimer

My method involves some custom shell scripts to work around the limitations of my UPS model and/or my current understanding of NUT. Though I try my best to implement security best practices here, please use this with caution as you will need to run custom scripts to gracefully shutdown your validator node during a power outage.

Context

We want our validator node to gracefully shut down when the UPS is cut off from it's power supply and turn itself back on when power is restored.

However, I have not tested my UPS setup with an actual power outage followed by a power restoration. I also encountered several restrictions with my particular Prolink UPS model which makes testing of actual scenarios extremely time consuming. Further, all of my simulated power outage-recovery scenarios so far have not been successful using the Network UPS Tools (NUT) default settings. Hence I will be using custom scripts to respond to power events retrieved from the UPS.

To do this, I use a separate Raspberry Pi device to serve as a NUT server for automated shutdowns and a Wake-on-LAN server for automated power-ons.

Fortunately, we can get Raspberry Pis from $35 onward.

Because my goal for this guide is to be applicable to as many USB-enabled UPS models as possible, my method may not be the most optimal for the pros.

Setup Overview

WIP