[Nut-upsuser] Belkin F6C1100-UNV

[Eric S. Raymond]

Peter Selinger <selinger at mathstat.dal.ca>:
> One potential problem is that you are passing the parameters
> vendorid=0665 and subdriver=agiler when you start the driver manually,
> but you are passing no such parameters to upsdrvctl. You can put them
> into your ups.conf:
> 
> [myups]
>         driver = megatec_usb
>         port = auto
> 	vendorid = 0665
> 	subdriver = agiler

Ah, now that seemed to do the trick.

---------------------------- snip -----------------------------------------
root at snark:/home/esr/svn/nut/trunk# upsdrvctl start myups
Network UPS Tools - UPS driver controller 2.1.0
Network UPS Tools 2.1.0 - Megatec protocol driver 1.5.3 [megatec_usb]
Carlos Rodrigues (c) 2003-2007

Serial-over-USB transport layer for Megatec protocol driver [megatec_usb]

Megatec protocol UPS detected.
---------------------------- snip -----------------------------------------

Then it went into background.  I was able to go through the rest of the
steps in your installation procedure, getting the expected.

As I said, I'm not just here to solve my problem, I want to make
things easier for other in the future.  What more general lesson can
we draw from this?  What should be added to the installation
instructions?

> This is another potential problem. Why did the driver exit here? Did
> you press Ctrl-C, or did it fail by itself? 

I interrupted it.  Otherwise, looks like the driver would have looped
forever returning status info.
 
> > Driver failed to start (exit status=1)
> 
> Indeed, the message is not very helpful. The reason is that it doesn't
> happen very often, so nobody has yet cared to improve the output.

Let's think about it now.  We have a well-defined path to the error -- all  
I have to do is delete those two lines in my ups.conf.  What can be done 
in the code to make it emit a message that isn't a blank stone wall?  Or,
to put it another way, what can we do so that the users list will never
have to hear this question again?
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>