[Nut-upsuser] Re: your Tripp-Lite AVR550U

[Patrick Nolan]

Recently I was corresponding with Peter Selinger about how the
newhidups driver could be made to work with my Tripp-Lite AVR550U.
I downloaded the development version of NUT 2.1 and applied a
patch he produced to newhidups.  I was able to extract some useful
information about the device.

Peter Selinger wrote:

> Meanwhile, you can try running it without the -x generic -x
> vendorid=09ae options and see what happens. 
> 
> Once the driver is running, you should also run upsd, and then use
> upsc to display info from the UPS. You can follow the installation
> instructions. 
> 
> -- Peter
> 
> P.S. please keep this discussion on the mailing list (i.e., "reply to
> all").
> 

I have discovered that this is dangerous.  For instance,
./newhidups -DD -u root auto
causes the UPS to shut down when I kill the driver.  By thrashing around
with various combinations of arguments, I got the driver to run, 
apparently.  Then I tried upsd with no success.  At some point I must
have sent some really bad command to the UPS, because it locked up
completely.  It vanished from the USB bus.  It wouldn't turn off or
do its self-test.  I had to unplug it for 2 days before it recovered.
I can't remember the sequence that caused the failure, and I'm not eager
to try to reproduce it.

Also, is -u root necessary for newhidups?  In information-gathering mode
it doesn't work without it, even though I compiled using --with-user=ups
and ups owns the USB device.

By the way, I have corresponded with Tripp-Lite tech support about this 
hardware lockup and their own management software.  They seem to be as
dense as they come.  It's as if they didn't actually read my messages,
but popped out canned responses that have nothing to do with the actual
problem.