[Nut-upsuser] Looking for a low cost USB UPS that supports shutdown.return

[Arnaud Quette]

James, Mark,

on the original topic, Eaton manufactures various UPS ranges,
including a "Value" one.
Depending on your location, you may have access to Eaton eSeries (NV
and DX) or equivalent for your country.

2011/9/30 James Northcott / Chief Systems <james at chiefsystems.ca>:
>
>> I will be running more tests today since I want to get this working, I'll
>> post again if I find out anything else.
>>
> Halting looks like this, when I run "upsmon -c fsd" to simulate a power
> failure:
> (...)
> ===========
>
> * Stopping Network UPS Tools
> * Stopping virtual private network daemon(s)...
> * Asking all remaining processes to terminate...
> * Killing all remaining processes...
> * Deconfiguring network interfaces...
> * Deactivating swap...
> * Unmounting weak filesystems...
> mount: / is busy
> * Shutting down the UPS ...
> Network UPS Tools - UPS driver controller 2.4.3
> Network UPS Tools - Generic HID driver 0.34 (2.4.3)
> USB communication driver 0.31
> No matching HID UPS found
> Driver failed to start (exit status=1)
>
> * Will now halt
>
> ============
>
> OK, so the problem is that at shutdown-time, "upsdrvctl shutdown" cannot
> find the device on the USB bus.
>
> After some playing around, I've found that this happens when the udev
> service is not running.  To duplicate this, you can do (on Ubuntu):
>
> service udev stop
> /sbin/upsdrvctl shutdown
>
> WARNING:  if your system isn't like mine, and this actually does work, it
> will cut power to all loads on the UPS, so be careful here.
>
> I attempted to start the udev service before calling upsdrvctl in
> /etc/init.d/ups-monitor, but the driver still failed to load.  I will try
> some more tomorrow.
>
> In the mean time, if anybody has run into this before, I would love some
> pointers.

I'm currently working on 2.6.2-1 packages, with some issues that delays upload.

there are probably 2 things in your issue:
- add "udev" to /etc/init.d/nut, sections Required-Start and
Required-Stop (the latter being the most important for this specific
shutdown issue).
Ie
# Required-Start:    $local_fs $syslog $network $remote_fs udev
# Required-Stop:     $local_fs $syslog $network $remote_fs udev

I'm also evaluating there the use of "Should-{Start,Stop}" since not
all systems provide udev (in Debian, only Debian GNU/Linux does!)
- usbfs being already unmounted, but this should be solved by the
above fix, through deps.

Please tell me back your results,
Arnaud
-- 
Linux / Unix Expert R&D - Eaton - http://powerquality.eaton.com
Network UPS Tools (NUT) Project Leader - http://www.networkupstools.org/
Debian Developer - http://www.debian.org
Free Software Developer - http://arnaud.quette.free.fr/