[Nut-upsuser] APC Matrix 5000 UPS

[Charles Lepple]

On 12/7/05, Stewart Ferguson <Stewart.Ferguson at ee.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> I've resent this as I've had no reply, which I suspect/hope is because
> the original post got lost amongst the flood of Asian spammers posting
> to the list a few weeks back.  Apologies if I'm wrong with this theory!

It may be that nobody else on the list has firsthand experience with
that driver. Russell Kroll used to do a lot of work with APC hardware,
but I do not believe he is active in development any more. Nigel
Metheringham is listed at the top of the driver source code as well.

> I can get nut to work with this UPS using the apcsmart driver, but only
> with limited functionality.  It is only reporting the OL/OB status and
> that's about it.  None of the other useful variables such as run time,
> load etc are reported and initiating battery tests does not work either.

Have you tried the old stable tree (1.4)? No guarantees, but I think
Russell may have worked on that one.

> I know the Matrix UPS is capable of much more than this, as using the
> APC software from a Windows box gives full functionality, but I need
> something that runs under Linux.

It might be necessary to do some snooping of the serial traffic in Windows.

(Part of the problem is that APC is notorious for not publishing any
information about their command sets, and as a result, developers have
to reverse-engineer the protocol. You may have run across a corner
case; namely, the capabilities parser seems to bail out too early.)

--
- Charles Lepple