[Nut-upsuser] newhidups, udev, usb, and frustration

[Denis Hainsworth]

Hello,
I hope someone can help me.  I'm trying to get this all working without
some stupid hack.  So far no dice.  Not sure if there is a new feature
in CVS or something that might help. I'd appreciate any suggestions.

Got a belkin F6C550-AVR.
redhat FC3ish system
libusb-0.1.8-3
nut-2.0.3-0.fc4.2
udev-039-10.FC3.8

Now first off while udev is nifty, but the whole usb udev subsystems
were driving me crazy.  add to that the fact that aparently my version
of libusb doesnt pay attention  to udev devices as well as the fact that
for a while I had fc4 udev which installed fine on my system but
apparently is broken in some way since I couldn't get any rules to
apply.  backrevving to fc3 udev and i am in a good place. if i plug the
ups in i see it show up, udev follows my rules and updates the group and
permissions for both /dev/hiddevX and /dev/usbdevX devices.  I can also
make udev create a symlink to usbdev if I wanted to.  here's the part
that has been driving me crazy.  it seems like newhidups uses perhaps
some library calls from libusb to discover usb devices??  it appears
that it will only pay attention to /proc/bus/usb/XXX/YYY devices.  since
udev(or at least my version of it) doesnt do anything with these devices
I can use udev rules to fix the persmissions and newhidups will only
work if I run it as root.  there are several things that could fix my
situation and i was hoping someone would know if any exist.

o can you tell nut through a conf file to run as root? i believe the
package i am using from fc4 uses user "nut".  I'd like to stick with the
package I have then run my own version.  this is the worst way to make
this work but it will work.

o is there a version of libusb and/or nut that would let me specifiy a
/dev device for newhidusb to look at instead of scanning what seems to
be /proc/bus/usb/XXX ?  i cant tell udev to create a symlink and so I
dont need newhidusb to scan for devices but nothing I seem to do appears
to make it look at /dev/hiddev0 etc.   this is my preferred way to make
this work since i will be using standard udev configs and simply
pointing nut at the devices i create.  all very straight forward.

Like I said at the beginning I have a somewhat monsterous distro that I
upgrade as I need things.  for example I only got udev working so I
could use nut.  udev seems to be completly functional now and now I
discover newhidups doesn't even seem to use its devices.

hopefully i am missing something simple, but i have combed the web for
several days and experiemented for hours without being able to get it
working how I would like.  so I hope someone can help.

thanks
-denis



-- 
____________________________________________________________
Denis Alan Hainsworth     | http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~denis/  
denis at alumni.brandeis.edu | "Life is just one big sad christmas."