No, this is not the nut that you crack the shell and enjoy the contents.

If you have ever experienced an improper shutdown because your laptop decided to troll you, you know what the consequences are. If you’re lucky, that PowerPoint slides you just poured all your heart and soul into is the only thing that is corrupted. If you’re unlucky, the files that make sure your laptop even runs in the first place (we call ‘em system files) get corrupted and there goes your entire operating system.

That sucks, doesn’t it?

Well, things suck even more when it comes to servers, which contain a lot more data than your average laptop and are a lot more crucial to technical operations than your average laptop. Your manager will definitively not be happy once they learn the server hosting all the company’s proprietary data got shut down improperly.

Unlike laptops that are prone to hardware issues, server hardwares are actually quite resilient, unless your server is 10 years old like the ones in my club. So most of the time, improper shutdown means a sudden loss of power. And unfortunately, you can’t really just upgrade your company’s power grid overnight.

That’s where Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) comes in.

A UPS is simply a battery. When the main power supply is suddenly cut off, the UPS immediately kicks in to make sure your server stays alive for another 5 - 10 minutes. This buys you enough time to perform a proper shutdown on the server and wait until main power returns.

Okay, that sounds nice. But how would you know when your server loses main power and UPS kicks in?

That’s where Network UPS Tools comes in.

It’s a bunch of tools that you can install on your server. Once installed, you can set it up to connect to the UPS via SNMP interface. This allows the server to learn that “oh, I’m currently living on UPS” and email you a notification telling you to shut it down. Or you can just do some further configurations so that the server shuts itself down once it detects UPS charge (and you can still receive the email as a bonus).

Network UPS Tools also allows you to query the status of the UPS, i.e. how much charge it has left, what its specs are, etc. Quite necessary since you need to monitor the UPS as well, otherwise you wouldn’t have a functioning UPS when shit hits the fan.

Network UPS Tools is abbreviated as NUT.

And as my sysadmins like to say whenever they configure a UPS:

“We need to nut the UPS. We need to nut everything.”

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.