I looked for this and didn’t find anything on it. I would like to see the USB ports communication with uninterruptible power supplies. Ideally, I’d like the router to:
Email me if the UPS is triggered.
Allow the router to act as a UPS Master (send notices to a list of IP addresses on any of the VLANs the router controls).
Be able to trigger a shutdown of the UPS.
Be able to restart itself when power resumes.
My NAS can do all of this, but I’d like my Balance 20X to do it instead as my NAS can only access the machines on the one VLAN it is on.
The NAS can probably run databases or host web apps and utilize USB-attached disk drives, does that mean Peplink boxes should do all of these things also? “me too” is not a very good argument.
Couldnt you just punch the firewall holes to grant your NAS access to notify machines on the other VLAN?
I am not asking for anything computationally intensive, just a pretty fundamental function.
Allowing Inter-VLAN routing to accommodate a NAS to communicate across VLANS and then setting up a bunch of rules to block Inter-VLAN routing of the other devices to try to plug the hole seems like a kludge.
I dont see how the firewall rules would be overly complex, a few allow rules followed by a DENY at the end. The firewall is more the capable handling this out of the box today.
Add whatever rules are needed to allow traffic and put a deny rule after that. Should be a single deny rule.
What other enterprise grade routers have builtin UPS integrations? How many devices/deployments would the feature be used in worldwide if you had to estimate? You have one… but that isnt much. I hate to say it but this feature doesnt make sense. That is my 2cents.
As Eric said, you can create a simple firewall rule to allow the NAS/UPS traffic to cross VLANS.
However, none of the things you listed are the responsibility of a router, nor should they be.
Some UPSs can directly do this, or you could have an SNMP monitor on your network do this (I guess in your case your NAS does this).
I think you’re saying have the router tell a bunch of other devices that they’re now running on battery? If so, Is this a USB only UPS? Why can’t those devices just listen to the UPS/NAS via IP?
Most UPSs can do this automatically based on runtime remaining or time elapsed.
Every UPS turns itself back on, the end devices will need to be set to auto power-on in their BIOS.
I disagree with your statement that a routers job does not include providing network status to the devices on a network. But obviously it’s Pepwave’s prerogative to add my feature request to the long list of feature requests that Pepwave has ignored over the years, like the often requested NTP services request.
If a router goes down, you will be disconnected. If it doesn’t you won’t. I’m all in favor of feature requests, however I don’t need a notification that my power is off. If you had a notification, what would you do? You don’t need to gracefully shut down a router.
So, if your router is plugged into a UPS (mine is) it will stay running until your UPS battery runs out. There is no reason to have to ‘gracefully’ shut down a router.
Respectfully, I’m just not seeing the value of having notifications from a router when the UPS is tripped. Your NAS (which stands to lose data if not gracefully shutdown), and your clients (also possible to lose data) already have the ability to interface with the UPS.