USB Splitter? ER, uh, what?

General Discussion
1

HI, I’m trying to connect two computers to one UPS unit, A Cyberpower 1000AVR.

The UPS unit provides a usb jack to control a single computer, but I want to plug both of my desktop computers into it just in case.

Is it possible to buy a “USB Splitter” cable and just plug both computers into the UPS unit or is there some other typical way of doing this?

As far as I can tell, the UPS unit doesn’t offer any kind of network signal or anything… if there’s no USB splitter, perhaps a script that runs on the first machine can send a shutdown signal to the second machine? But then, that sounds like a security risk. For all I know, Virutalmin offers the opportunity to script a shutdown on the second computer.

Any ideas on how to have the second machine shut down gracefully?

Thanks,
Tony

2

Howdy,

I don’t think that you can split the USB signal across multiple computers and not have craziness ensue :slight_smile: I believe that USB is a two-way protocol, and if the source begins getting two responses, all sorts of oddness and conflicts could erupt.

A way to solve the problem you’re after would be to setup your two computers to talk to each other, and have one notify the other when there’s a looming power problem.

There’s tools for Linux out there to handle it, one of which is called “NUT”. There’s a recent article on Linux.com that discusses it available here:

http://www.linux.com/news/hardware/peripherals/208971-smart-power-monitoring-with-network-ups-tools