[Nut-upsdev] Re : [team] Re: Adding power devices support to OCS Inventory NG

Fri Nov 18 08:08:20 UTC 2011

hi Arnaud,

Can you do a snmpwalk directly on the equipment and give us the resukt so we can see what
we can do. Our implementation for snmp perhaps be used for theses informations.

François

De : Arnaud Quette <aquette.dev at gmail.com>
À : developers.en at ocsinventory-ng.org 
Cc : NUT Developers <nut-upsdev at lists.alioth.debian.org> 
Envoyé le : Jeudi 17 Novembre 2011 17h18
Objet : [team] Re: Adding power devices support to OCS Inventory NG

Hi Guillaume and the list,

2011/11/15 Guillaume PROTET <guillaume at ocsinventory-ng.org>

Hi Arnaud,
>
>Thanks a lot for your email. Of course, we are interested to work with you on this. It could be really interesting to get this kind of informations in OCS Inventory.
>

I'm glad to see you're interested in ;)

If the "nut-scanner" command can use SNMP, an idea could be to integrate it directly in OCS SNMP scans steps.

well, nut-scanner is very NUT centric: it will show the basic info for detected devices, in order to configure the right NUT driver(s) for data acquisition (for protection or management purpose).

As an example for nut-scanner with SNMP, you would only get the IP address and the name of the detected MIB (which can only be resolved by the snmp-ups NUT driver)!

A special perl module could be create to make OCS agent able to scan NUT devices during its SNMP scans. I think it could be easily integrated. If you want, you can take a look at OCS Unix agent trunk branch on launchpad (https://code.launchpad.net/~ocsinventory-dev/ocsinventory-unix-agent/trunk) and take a look to lib/Ocsinventory/Agent/Modules/Snmp* files to give you an idea on how SNMP scans work.
>
>Of course, it is a first idea and there is surely an other way to do this :) :).
>
First note that NUT currently supports 12 MIBs, with ~8 more stagging.
And not all offers the same level of details and capabilities.
Some PDUs are very basic, for example.

I see a 2 steps way:

1) use the nut-scanner for a quick integration.
Refer to [1].

A Perl wrapper is planned (as for the existing "jNutScanner" [2]), that would help this effort.
Any Perl contrib is welcome BTW ;-)

This requires the nut-scanner binary to installed on the local system, that is:
- the server, for SNMP scans
- the agents for USB and still for IPMI (remote support planned) scans

Here is an example SNMP scan, in quiet mode with parsable output:

$ /path/to/nut-scanner -SPq --mask_cidr 166.99.250.58/24

SNMP:driver="snmp-ups",port="166.99.250.64",desc="Eaton 5PX",mibs="mge",community="public"
SNMP:driver="snmp-ups",port="166.99.250.26",desc="Evolution",mibs="mge",community="public"
SNMP:driver="snmp-ups",port="166.99.250.67",desc="DELL",mibs="ietf",community="public"
SNMP:driver="snmp-ups",port="166.99.250.7",desc="DBQ10634/5",mibs="aphel_revelation",community="public"
SNMP:driver="snmp-ups",port="166.99.250.118",desc="EATON",mibs="ietf",community="public"
SNMP:driver="snmp-ups",port="166.99.250.118",desc="Eaton 5PX 1500",mibs="pw",community="public"
SNMP:driver="snmp-ups",port="166.99.250.118",desc="Eaton 5PX",mibs="mge",community="public"

Note: the same device may be exposed several times, if it supports several MIBs (as for 166.99.250.118 above)!

2) configure and launch snmp-ups + upsd to get more (all) details

As told previously, the results of a NUT scan is very basic.

But many details can then be gathered using NUT [3] and its client interface (Perl binding available [4]).
See [5] for examples of UPS and PDU data reported by NUT, so that you can match with GLPI requirements or needs.

That method requires to setup NUT to talk to the SNMP device, but that is not a big deal.
The nut-scanner output can be used (either the parsable, or the direct nut ups.conf format)

So, does the above 2 steps suits you?
How can we collaborate on this topic?

Finally, NUT supports most (if not all) USB UPSs, and now IPMI power supply (most servers).
Can OCS handle this?
For the former, NUT can also provide a "Perl adapted header" (C header also attached).
For IPMI, there are generic ways that can be used to do this (I recommend a wrapper around FreeIPMI).

cheers,
Arnaud
--
[1] nut-scanner manpage(doc to be published with the next release)
http://www.networkupstools.org/docs/man/nut-scanner.html
[2] http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/nut/trunk/scripts/java/jNut/src/main/java/org/networkupstools/jnut/Scanner.java?view=co
[3] NUT architecture
http://www.networkupstools.org/docs/developer-guide.chunked/ar01s02.html
[4] UPS::Nut client Perl module: http://www.networkupstools.org/projects.html#_a_href_http_search_cpan_org_search_dist_ups_nut_ups_nut_a
[5] examples of NUT data output:
UPS: http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/nut/trunk/data/evolution500.seq?view=co
PDU: http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/nut/trunk/data/epdu-managed.dev?view=co
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