[Nut-upsuser] My NUT experience

[Arnaud Quette]

Hi Stephen,

2012/2/19 Stephen <steve at suasol.com>:
> 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.

I'm conscious that E Series NV are not the best nor easiest devices
Eaton is manufacturer.
But it's one of the cheapest, which explains the low level of features.

That said, I can help you setting up the right values, to get the
expected behavior.

> 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.

right, I'm also conscious of this weak point of NUT.
I've, for some years now, planned to complete configuration and to
provide code snippets for upsmon, to allow easy configuration for
specific needs.
Still to come, and depending on the available work force :-/

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

thanks for your feedback.

> 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.

I hope to finally get rid of these issues... soon.
But having told this for years makes me a bit pessimistic on a
possible availability date.

cheers,
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/