[Nut-upsuser] Re: followup : MGE Ellipse 800 USBS doesn't shutdown under FreeBSD

[arnaud.quette at mgeups.com]

[fwded to the list]

Hi François,

> I didn't post this on the list as it seems a little bit more MGE
> stuff than nut. Anyway feel free to post it if you consider it's
> relevant.
>
> This is the trace you were asking for. The Ellipse 800 correctly shut
> down in this test :
>
> This was running on a i386 recent hardware, the cpu load is under 5%,
> 360MB out of 512 of free memory and no IO's. We might say that this
> system does nothing :)
>
> I hope this might give you some interesting feedback.
>
> As you're at MGE, I should also report a strange behaviour I noticed.
>
> After an automatic 30% shutdown, I noticed a couple time that the
> upsc reported a strangely high level of charge of the battery
> (hereunder it's 88% only half an hour after a 30% shutdown, what a
> recharge !!)

Ellipse models are low end. These models have a kind of dumb
autonometer, with only 3 trend to estimate autonomy according
to the output load... Newer models (Ellipse Office and Protection
Center) have 7 trends. This explains why the autonomy might
decrease quickly.

About the recharge problem, these models doesn't store data when
powering off. Thus, when powered up, these doesn't know their
real autonomy and restart from 85 % IIRC, even if it was completly
drained 5 mn before... This was one of the weakness of these models.

> When I unpluged the UPS, the system very quickly went to 30% and then
> shutdown before completing the system shutdown. I was hopefully able
> to bring back the system operational with fsck.

In fact, this is linked to nut's integration / usage by the rc script.
Some models (genericups and other dumb things) might not support
delayed shutdown where smart UPS does.

I will try to address these points with the NUT Packaging Standard effort,
to unify NUT packages, integration and behavior. I'm in touch with
some BSD guys (as well as other Linux / Unix packagers) to deal with
this point.

Note that you adjust the delay for mge-shut in the ups.conf using
offdelay [and ondelay]. For more information, please check mge-shut
manpage.

As a final note, Ellipse models are not so weak. Low end models
are generally simple in terms of design and cost. And as NUT support
both low / mid and high end models from more than 40 manufacturers,
it's sometimes hard to make things that works everywhere with
every models. Anyway, rest assured that you won't have [better] support
for free/libre OSs than with MGE.

I hope to have answered your need.
Arnaud Quette
---
Linux / Unix Expert - MGE UPS SYSTEMS - R&D Dpt
OpenSource Developer - http://arnaud.quette.free.fr/
Debian Developer - http://people.debian.org/~aquette/
 ... and much more ...