[Nut-upsuser] Using NUT to signal an appliance

[Matthew.Koundakjian at Engility.com]

Charles, thank you for the thoughtful and helpful reply!

The ACNC box uses an RS232 serial interface for UPS connection.

From: Charles Lepple [mailto:clepple at gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2018 6:47 PM
To: Koundakjian, Matthew @ Engility <Matthew.Koundakjian at Engility.com>
Cc: nut-upsuser at alioth-lists.debian.net
Subject: Re: Using NUT to signal an appliance


EXTERNAL EMAIL -- This message originates from outside of Engility.
I have a disk box from ACNC (Jetstor 416is) that has an UPS port.  The manual describes an UPS port: “2. Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) Port (APC Smart UPS only) The subsystem may come with an optional UPS port allowing you to connect APC Smart UPS device. Connect the cable from the UPS device to the UPS port located at the rear of the subsystem. This will automatically allow the subsystem to use the functions and features of the UPS.”

Is there a known way to *send* APC smart signaling to an external device from NUT?

While it would theoretically be possible to emulate an APC UPS over USB, you would need an embedded system such as a BeagleBone Black which implements the peripheral side of USB, versus the host side that PCs have. There is also the possibility that the NAS software is sending different USB requests than what NUT uses, so that could be interesting to debug.

You could also check with the apcupsd.org<http://apcupsd.org> lists to see if anyone there knows of such a system.


 What about dumb APC signaling?

Given that the excerpt from the manual says "automatically", I am not sure if that would be supported by their software. On the UPS side, "dumb signaling" typically uses relay contacts to connect lines together, so depending on how the disk box and its cable harness are wired, you might need a cable with relays, which is starting to get complicated for only a handful of feedback states (online, on battery, low battery).

Unless you have a lot of copies of this system, it might be easier to find an administrative API where the NUT system sends a command with curl or wget to the shutdown endpoint on that API.

It's also worth asking the vendor to support NUT and/or apcupsd's network protocol.

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