[Nut-upsuser] My NUT experience

[Stephen]

Hey all, I've had a fairly unpleasant experience getting nut to work.
I like the nut architecture and understand 

1. I check the nut hardware list for a usb model with five star support. Great,
my supplier has an Eaton E Series NV.

2. I run blazer_usb as suggested, tweak nut.conf:
MODE=standalone
and ups.conf respectively:
[eaton]
    port = auto
That's pretty easy so far. It took a little tweaking to get the right magic in
upsd.users and upsmon.conf. It's at this point I wonder why I should have to
tweak any of this stuff for the simple case of 1 UPS directly connected to 1
machine.

3. Turn off the power to test the configuration. OK, I get an "on battery"
message. I wait a while for the automatic shutdown to kick in. It never does.
The machine dies uncleanly the the battery eventually runs out. I try again,
this time watching the upsc output. OL changes to OB but never gets to LB.

Some reading of the blazer manpage would lead me to believe that this model
can't/doesn't report the battery.charge and I may need to calibrate somehow? I
spend several fruitless and frustrating hours trying to tweak these values to
trigger an LB status and a clean shutdown.

4. I never get this to work so start looking at upssched.conf so I can just
trigger a shutdown after say 20s on battery. Finally, rather than have to deal
with all this complexity, I give up and have NOTIFYCMD call upsmon -c fsd
without any timeouts etc.

So finally it works, kind of.
Thanks for listening.
Stephen

TL;DR
* The hardware compatibility table shouldn't list this model (Eaton E NV) as
five stars support or should have a large caveat attached.
* Configuration is still tedious for simple home users. Something is wrong if I
have to a) configure users b) write a script which gets called from upssched and
handle. Please, just a simple SHUTDOWN_AFTER_X_SECONDS_ON_BATTER variable and
handle all the state changes internally.