[Nut-upsdev] Proposed addition to apcsmart driver

[Arnaud Quette]

Hi Alex,

since I have no knowledge of the apcsmart driver, nor much time
currently, I've forwarded your msg to the NUT development list. I hope
somebody can take over your call.

btw, please subscribe to the list for further discussions...

2007/5/28, Alex Brodsky <abrodsky at acs.uwinnipeg.ca>:
> Hi,
>
> My name is Alex Brodsky, I am a faculty member at University of
> Winnipeg.
>
> I have been using NUT for a while now (on OpenBSD), but noticed that
> I could not program the EEPROM values (using upsrw) of my Smart UPS
> SC1000, even though, it worked fine with a Smart UPS 1500.  The
> manual for the SC1000 claims that the eeprom values could be programmed.
>
> I investigated further and discovered that the result of the 'a'
> command to the SC1000 UPS, which queries the available commands for
> the UPS did not include the ^Z (dec 26) command in the return
> string.  Thus, the driver did not enable the commands for modifying
> the eeprom values.  (See the do_capabilities() and getbaseinfo() in
> drivers/apcsmart.c.)  However, the UPS did accept the ^Z command and
> did in fact return the list of eeprom values (capabilities) as it is
> documented to do.  The short of it is: the SC1000 claims it does not
> support the ^Z command, when in reality it does.
>
> This may be a ``feature'' of the SC series of UPSes, which are low
> end versions of the Smart UPS series.
>
> I patched the apcsmart code to assume that ^Z command was present,
> yielding full functionality for changing the eeprom values.  To make
> this more general, I added an additional variable (in
> upsdrv_makevartable()), which when set to true in ups.conf assumed
> that the ^Z command was present.
>
> I currently have this patch in my local version, 2.0.3, (2.0.3 is
> available as a port for OpenBSD).  I can forward-port this to the
> 2.0.5 if you think it would be useful.  Currently, the added variable
> is called ``usecap'', short for use capabilities.  If you would like
> a diff for the forward port, but would like the variable name changed
> to something else, please let me know.

Laslty, you are welcome to post your patch for review and discussion.

Arnaud
-- 
Linux / Unix Expert - MGE UPS SYSTEMS - R&D Dpt
Network UPS Tools (NUT) Project Leader - http://www.networkupstools.org/
Debian Developer - http://people.debian.org/~aquette/
OpenSource Developer - http://arnaud.quette.free.fr/