[Nut-upsdev] How verbose should NUT be by default?

[Jim Klimov]

Hello all,

  During discussion of https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues/1782
me and Greg uncovered a diametral difference of opinion about the verbosity
of NUT programs in general, and of `upsmon -K` (checking for POWERDOWNFLAG
during shutdown integration) in particular.

  To me as a sysadmin type often (in the past at least) having to
troubleshoot the tails and ends of systems' untimely (or unclean) demise,
all info about it feels like useful clues. And often is.

  Also NUT dealing in the business of cutting power to this computer, or to
others, intentionally or by misconfiguration (e.g. by spouting garbage to
serial ports that confuses an UPS that talks a different protocol), is a
bit more "special" than numerous other programs, tools, daemons and
services.

  The opposite opinion is that programs should be quiet until asked to
squeak (e.g. by restarting with higher debug verbosity... "that would help
troubleshooting why the rack went down last week, right!" says the sysadmin
me).

  So here is a shout-out to other practitioners: should NUT programs print
their banner and other info (e.g. competing daemon instance was/wasn't
found and how that was determined) every time they start by default? Or
should they indeed be revised to talk less (and then settings and
init-scripts in packaging can be tweaked to retain current behavior should
distros/users want to)? Note that an alternative is to redirect to
/dev/null the messages in init-scripts and similar integrations instead.

Jim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/nut-upsdev/attachments/20230109/48a26ff5/attachment.htm>