[Info-vax] X86 first boot? - A Really Stupid Question

[Michael Moroney]

kludge at panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:

>Dave Froble  <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:

>>> Another issue are companies who may not want to release proprietary device info to
>>> some rinky-dink company called VSI. I saw this myself once long ago, when I asked
>>> for information on talking to a UPS over a serial port.  The person I talked to
>>> seemed willing at first but later wouldn't, and it sounded like an order not to from
>>> above.

>There's a lot of this, and when it happens we figure it out.  We plug the 
>UPS into a Windows machine with the vendor's driver and look at what is going
>down the serial line with a terminal Y-cabled off the port.  Then we write
>a driver.

That's approximately what I did, but I did much less than I wanted. I wanted
something where a process monitoring the UPS's serial line would fire off
SYS$SYSTEM:SHUTDOWN if power was lost for more than X seconds, and abort the
shutdown if power resumed before SHUTDOWN started actually shutting stuff down.
I had bigger plans for this and wanted to put it on freeware or something.
Not a commercial product.