[Nut-upsuser] Problems with NUT 2.7.2 on CentOS 7 and using the Mini-Box OpenUPS

[Charles Lepple]

On Mar 13, 2015, at 8:21 AM, Philip Taylor <philip at kelsotowers.co.uk> wrote:

> I’m a new user of NUT and the OpenUPS - in the past I’ve used APC hardware and apcupsd on Centos 6.
> 
> I’ve built NUT 2.7.2 from source but used the OpenUPS HID driver v0.4 that’s in github. I’m using firmware version 1.5 on the openups which is the latest published version; I’ve also tried 1.7 which Mini-box sent to me but reverted to the published version. Their support seems a bit slow!
> 
> I’ve got NUT working OK and the upsd running, with upsmon working OK too - all is well as long as I leave the power on, or the battery takes over but doesn’t need to shut down the system!
> 
> But if I try to shut down the system using 'upsdrvctl shutdown’ I get a USB error message - ‘Can’t claim USB device [04d8:doo4]:’ This looks like permissions but I’ve set up UDEV and the users in accordance with the instructions.

The documentation isn't explicit about this, but 'upsdrvctl shutdown' is meant to be run after all of the other processes on the system have been killed, real filesystems have been unmounted, and the kernel shutdown syscall is about to be called. Usually the init scripts will take care of this, although I don't know how CentOS handles that specifically.

This includes the existing usbhid-ups driver - only one process can talk *directly* to the UPS at once, and it is usually a driver that is working with upsd.

If you want to test the low-battery shutdown procedure (where upsmon tells the rest of the system to shut down, then tells the UPS to power off), you can run 'upsmon -c fsd' (Forced ShutDown). The init scripts should call 'upsdrvctl shutdown' implicitly when everything else has stopped.

> Also if the battery runs down, there is no communication from the UPS via USB - the power just dies. I could use the motherboard toggle to shut down the system, but then I can’t run pre-shutdown scripts.

I wonder if that is a calibration issue? Most UPSes will recalibrate as part of their battery test process, and that should update the runtime estimates and other variables necessary to detect a low battery condition. Since you mentioned that the test commands don't show up in upscmd, is there a button or jumper to trigger calibration?

If either the runtime or battery percentage variable is reliable, it should also be possible to use the 'ignorelb' setting to synthesize the low battery signal:

   http://www.networkupstools.org/docs/man/ups.conf.html

> I also can’t collect any data by upsrw (returns blank) or upscmd (no commands available) - though these functions might not be implemented in the OpenUPS - does anyone know?

Technically, 'upsrw' could have been called 'upsw' since it does not actually read the variables: it just lists the writable ones, and allows one to set them. But the OpenUPS driver does not list any HID usage items as read/write, or as commands, so that is to be expected:

   https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/blob/master/drivers/openups-hid.c#L297

NUT takes a somewhat conservative approach to the USB HID drivers: we only query for variables and commands that are known to work with that vendor's UPS. There are some debug modes available in usbhid-ups that would list all of the potential variables that the firmware supports, but you may not want to run those on a production system. Let us know (this list or nut-upsdev) if you would like more details on that.

-- 
Charles Lepple
clepple at gmail