[Nut-upsuser] Availability of the driver for MGE* Network Management Cards (mge-xml)

[Arnaud Quette]

Dear users,

This mail is to announce the beta availability of the mge-xml driver
in NUT's trunk.
This (overdue) driver allows to support MGE* (UPS Systems and Office
Protection Systems) Network Management Cards.

This development is sponsored by MGE Office Protection Systems, which
is also the NUT sponsor, web hoster and (new) benefactor in general.

This driver offers similar services to the MGE Network Shutdown Module
proprietary software.
It's still in beta since it's really recent, and lack some features to
be 100 % complete, but it's already quite stable and provides a lot of
data.
It's also using the common HID core, as usbhid-ups and newmge-shut,
and so support the same data set (ie still no 3 phase data). The next
development step will be the Notification support (UPS broadcasted
alarms).

Testing instruction:
===============
- retrieve the latest trunk:
$ svn co svn://svn.debian.org/nut/trunk

- build as usual (mge-xml has no external dependency and is so built by default)
$ autoreconf && ./configure && make

- optionally install nut
$ make install

- configure NUT. For ups.conf:
[mge-xml]
 driver = mge-xml
 port = <MGE NMC IP address or IP name>

Since I intend to backport it to Testing for the NUT 2.2.2 release,
feedback is really welcome.

Arnaud
-- 
Linux / Unix Expert R&D - MGE Office Protection Systems - http://www.mgeops.com
Network UPS Tools (NUT) Project Leader - http://www.networkupstools.org/
Debian Developer - http://people.debian.org/~aquette/
Free Software Developer - http://arnaud.quette.free.fr/