[nut-upsdev] Belkin and newhidups

[Peter Selinger]

zaid_aj at telus.net wrote:
> 
> Hello Peter,
> Regarding the ups.status, I wasn't sure if the normal status of the
> UPS (if the battery is fully charged) should show "OL CHRG" or just
> "OL", because it always shows "OL CHRG" here, I'll leave it running
> for more time and see if that changes.

No, I think it is always "OL CHRG". At least that's what mine always
shows, and it has been charging since 2002 :)

> The latest usage tree follows:

(snip)

OK, that's more or less what I had, except for the very first item
(which the unpatched parser threw away).

Did you manage to get any of the instant commands to work?
Particularly, can you manage to do a "soft shutdown" by writing some
combination of stuff to the writable variables ups.timer.restart and
ups.timer.shutdown? You can test this with the "upsrw" command.

As I explained on the belkinunv(8) man page, my Belkin Universal UPS
has the problem that one cannot do a "soft shutdown". It can only do a
timed shutdown or a permanent shutdown. Here is my definition of these
terms:

 Permanent shutdown: The UPS load goes off and stays off, until a human
 user presses the "on" button on the panel.

 Timed shutdown: The UPS load goes off and comes back on after a
 predetermined number of minutes, irrespective of where there is AC
 power present or not.

 Soft shutdown: The UPS load goes off. If AC power is present, the UPS
 load comes back on after a few seconds. If AC power is not present,
 the UPS load comes back on after AC power returns (and possibly after
 waiting for the battery to charge to a predetermined level).

On my Belkin, I can do a permanent shutdown by setting
ups.timer.shutdown=1. 

I can do a timed shutdown by setting
ups.timer.restart=2, then
ups.timer.shutdown=1. 
(Note that the restart timer is in minutes, the shutdown timer is in
seconds, and there is no control over when the restart timer will be
decreased, so one must use "2" for it). 

Unfortunately, both are pretty useless if one wants the system to
reboot without human intervention.

I can create a soft shutdown situation *only* by waiting until the
batteries run out on their own. 

I am hoping that perhaps your Belkin model is less brain-damaged than
mine. I would be keen to know the results of your experiments. If a
soft shutdown is indeed impossible, then I would not recommend anybody
buying any more Belkin UPS. By the way, the problem is not specific to
Linux; I tested the Windows driver and it had the same problems (and
more).

-- Peter