[Nut-upsuser] Some FreeBSD tips (was: OMNIVS1500XL and FreeBSD)

[Charles Sprickman]

Hello all,

I just wanted to dump some info here for the archives.

Here's the original thread for reference:

http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/nut-upsuser/2007-March/002403.html

Charles Lepple did a tremendous amount of work to get my TrippLite USB 
working on FreeBSD 6.2.  I'm running an svn version (nut-2.1.0-r879) to 
pick up his changes to tripplite_usb.  So far, it is working well.

A few tips specific to FreeBSD that we worked out over the past month or 
so follow...

If you're working with a UPS and you need to flip between talking to it as 
a "ugen" device and a "uhid" device, you'll want to build a kernel that 
does not include "uhid".  Full kernel building instructions are here:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/kernelconfig.html

The change is pretty simple, just edit "GENERIC" and look for the "uhid" 
line in the kernel config and comment it out.  Build and install the new 
kernel.  Add a line to the boot loader config file (/boot/loader.conf) 
like so:  uhid_load="YES"

You now can load/unload uhid at will without rebooting.

If you currently have the uhid kernel module loaded, this will let you
start talking to the ups via ugen:

kldunload uhid.ko
unplug/replug usb connection

and vice-versa to go back to uhid:

kldload uhid.ko
unplug/replug usb connection

Another snag I ran into is that some configuration of devfs is required to 
run all the NUT daemons as a non-root user.  The FreeBSD port makes a 
half-hearted attempt to fix this, but only for serial devices, not USB 
devices.

In the following example, I've created a user/group "nut" and am going to 
allow the nut user to read/write to one usb port (/dev/usb1) and the 
actual UPS device (/dev/ugen0).

add the following to /etc/devfs.conf:

perm    usb1    0660
own     usb1    root:nut

create an /etc/devfs.rules with the following:

[usb_devices=10]
add path 'ugen*' mode 0660 group nut

add that rule to your startup settings in /etc/rc.conf:

devfs_system_ruleset="usb_devices"

and then restart devfs:

/etc/rc.d/devfs restart

Note that libusb seems to need the /dev/usbX device that your UPS hangs 
off of readable by nut - it's not enough to just have /dev/ugen0 readable.

That's all for now...

Thanks,

Charles

___
Charles Sprickman
NetEng/SysAdmin
Bway.net - New York's Best Internet - www.bway.net
spork at bway.net - 212.655.9344