[Nut-upsuser] Multiple instances of the same model, with same ID and no serial number!

[Steve Ballantyne]

How is this for a conundrum?

I have three Tripp-Lite SMART5001U's running in the same one rack,
attached to the same host running NUT.  I am running the tripplite_usb
driver thanks to some crafty hacking of Charles (thank you sir!).  Now
you may ask, "hey dip****, why have THREE 1U UPS's stacked up, when
you can have a single larger one with the capacity of three?".  Don't
ask.  I didn't build this stack of stupidity.  I only have to support
it!

But being that all of these buggers are identical ... I cannot get nut
to tell them apart and so I can only monitor one of them at a time!
Before I go writing a script that bounces between the three of them,
is there a way I can get all three to work?

It seems that I can use 'sudo /usr/local/ups/bin/upsrw -u pi -p pi -s
ups.id=1 SMART500RT1U-1 at localhost' to change the id (from the default
of zero).  But then when I load up the next one, nut says "oh, I
remember this one ... it has an id of 1!".  So it assigns '1' as the
id of the second UPS, then dropping the first.  UGH.

Then I was looking at using the driver to try and change the serial
number at load time, like this 'sudo /usr/local/ups/bin/tripplite_usb
-u pi -a SMART500RT1U-2 -x serial=1' but I get an error, "No matching
USB/HID UPS found".  That tells me that the -x options are to help
match a unit.  Not to go changing the properties on the fly.

Can anyone think of a clever way to make this work?  The only thing
that really defines these as different is the /dev/bus/usb value.  So
I would need some way of telling NUT to "fake it".  :-)

Steve Ballantyne
Network Engineer
MCSE/MCDST; Novell CLA; LPIC-1; CTT+; A+; Network+; Linux+; Server+;
I-Net+; Security+; SonicWALL CSSA