[Nut-upsuser] My NUT experience

[Arnaud Quette]

Hi Stephen,

As you will see, I've not forgotten you, and I've considered your experience.
Thanks a lot for this feedback, and see below for some improvements.

2012/2/20 Arnaud Quette <aquette.dev at gmail.com>:
> 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.

I've done something better by adding a basic 'guesstimation' of the
high / low battery voltage.
In other words, you can now get rid of these settings, and have
something suitable (at least, almost the same as in WinPower) by
default.

I've just committed this change to the development version (aka,
Subversion trunk).
So if you're interested in testing it, feedback and comments are welcome.

I'm now checking for a similar kind of "spell" for the runtime.
But bear in mind that cheap units don't provide as much features as
more expensive ones.
And this is something that we don't expose in the HCL: it's simply
there to tell users the level of confidence in the driver.
And not the features or user experience level you would get...

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/