[Nut-upsuser] How to find out the output of "upsc" for each UPS model supported by NUT ?

[Charles Lepple]

On Jul 7, 2013, at 6:09 AM, Alf Høgemark wrote:

> Do other NUT users miss knowing exactly how the upsc output will look for a UPS model ?
> Does anyone have opinions on where we could record such information ? Should it be one page per model, or one page per driver with a section for each model ?

It would be nice to collect this information somehow. At the moment, we only really have upsc information for the UPS models which have been problematic, plus a few more emails where users have sent HCL updates.

The exact organization of the content probably doesn't matter, so long as the output is cross-referenced with a driver. (In the Thinkwiki example, their use of categories seemed backwards to me at first. However, it is useful to know whether a given laptop supports a particular feature, and the category listing at the bottom provides that nicely.)

I would be curious to hear what others think about a wiki or similar user-editable resource. The NUT HCL was never meant to fill that role, but a completely free-form wiki might not be as useful as a custom web site. In either case, we would need to have some decent spam protection. The NUT Trac instance was hit fairly hard a while ago.

Mike brings up an important point, in that NUT can only relay the information that the UPS provides. If that information is incorrect, this sort of repository could flag those variables or instant commands as being improperly implemented by the UPS.

Perhaps we could do something like those online UPS sizing wizards: ask the user which features matter most, and show a filtered list of suggested UPS models.

The biggest issue in my mind is that UPS vendors frequently change things out under the hood without changing the model name. Sometimes it is for the better - Powercom shifted to a standard USB HID PDC interface (which was easier to support in NUT). However, APC apparently dropped support for a lot of variables from their HID PDC interface in favor of their proprietary Microlink protocol (see apcupsd.com for more information).

Maybe we can steer people away from bad UPS models or vendors, but in the end, if I were purchasing a new UPS, I would want a no-questions-asked, open box refund policy from the distributor.

Alf: I like this idea, but I don't have the free time to help with this for a while. (We still need to get the first Git-based source release out the door.) Feel free to take this idea and run with it.

-- 
Charles Lepple
clepple at gmail