[Nut-upsdev] Totally beyond me

[Charles Lepple]

On Jul 13, 2015, at 7:59 PM, john hart <jsamcr at yahoo.com> wrote:

> When I ran  upsdrvctl start  I got a message about the usbhid-ups driver.  It appears that NUT
> is not configured with the driver.

What is the exact message?

The "nut" package in Debian depends on both "nut-client" and "nut-server", and the USB drivers are in nut-server. (There are other packages for the less common drivers.)

https://packages.debian.org/jessie/i386/nut-server/filelist

>  The instructions in the man page is all greek to me.

As you may be aware, most man pages are reference material. However, in the "See Also" section at the end of most (if not all) of the NUT man pages, it mentions the NUT website. The documentation for installing the packages is online, as well as in the "nut-doc" package: http://www.networkupstools.org/docs/user-manual.chunked/ar01s05.html#Installing_packages 

There is also this document by Roger Price: <http://rogerprice.org/NUT.html>. While it is written with openSUSE in mind, the Debian version would not be that different. Configuration files are stored in /etc/nut rather than /etc/ups, and you determine the Debian paths of other files by searching the package database for the last part of the path, e.g.:

$ dpkg --search usbhid-ups
nut-server: /lib/nut/usbhid-ups
nut-server: /usr/share/man/man8/usbhid-ups.8.gz

> As I said before, I am not a programmer.  I suspect that NUT might need to be compiled with that driver, but I really don't know.  Any instructions would have to be written so that ANYBODY could follow them, not just programmers.

Writing good software documentation involves having non-programmers work with programmers to identify the parts that non-programmers shouldn't need to know. It would be great if you could let us know where we should put extra pointers to the documentation that we have.

-- 
Charles Lepple
clepple at gmail