[Nut-upsuser] Ex post facto logging

[Greg Troxel]

Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com> writes:

> I lost power for about 40 seconds. From what I can see NUT quickly
> shut down the system and boot it back up when power was restored. That
> also worked. Everything worked as designed, except I would expect such
> a brief shutdown to be survivable.

It's really odd to lose power for 40 seconds in my experience.  I wonder
roughly where you are (looks like NA due to 120V, state?) and if you
understand the mechanism for how it came back so fast.

I would look in the logs and see if you can find that nut logged
something about "low battery" or "forced shutdown".  It is possible your
batteries are tired, and it's possible that things are not configured
right.

You left out what the load on the UPS is.   And battery type.  I'm
guessing 2 x 12V 7Ah size, perhaps labeled by marketing types as 9Ah.

You left out the manufacture data / when you bought this.  If it's 4 or
5 years old, sick batteries would not be surprising.  If it's 1-2, they
would be.  But I don't have experience with CPS and if they treat the
batteries better they may go longer.

> The only question mark in my mind is that the battery should've been
> enough to last those measly 40 seconds. Output of upsc is below. This
> is about an hour after the power was restored, and I see that
> battery.charge is only 29, and it is slowly increasing.

There are a bunch of things in that output that don't really make sense
to me.  I think you need to understand all the settings and then pull
the UPS from the computer, put a light bulb or two on it, and do a test.
But if you figure out that settings were odd and fix them, you are
probably ok.

> So, I think is that my batteries are due for a replacement. I would've
> wanted to see what was logged during the outage, but I can't find
> anything in journalctl for nut-monitor or nut-server. This is Ubuntu
> 24. Should there be something logged, somewhere?

I use a script running upsc and reporting via mqtt logging in home
assistant, and thus have data for outages.  But 40s is crazy.

> battery.charge: 29
> battery.charge.low: 10
> battery.charge.warning: 20

10 for low seems a bit low but not crazy.  29 is super low for having
experience a 40s outage.  I would see where it is after 48h.

> battery.mfr.date: CPS
> battery.runtime: 2939
> battery.runtime.low: 300

2939s is a very good runtime, and 300s is a reasoable "when runtime is
below this value, start shutdown".

> battery.type: PbAcid
> battery.voltage: 27.3
> battery.voltage.nominal: 24
> device.mfr: CPS
> device.model: CP1500AVRLCDa
> device.serial: BHQLW7002402
> device.type: ups
> driver.debug: 0

> driver.flag.allow_killpower: 0

This seems off; the OS should be able to stop the inverter.

> driver.name: usbhid-ups
> driver.parameter.pollfreq: 30
> driver.parameter.pollinterval: 10
> driver.parameter.port: auto
> driver.parameter.synchronous: auto

I'm unclear on these.  Did you get a log entry when power failed?

> driver.state: quiet
> driver.version: 2.8.1

That's old.  Update to the latest release.  I know you're using Ubuntu
and they are behind.  Update anyway.

> driver.version.data: CyberPower HID 0.8
> driver.version.internal: 0.52
> driver.version.usb: libusb-1.0.27 (API: 0x100010a)
> input.voltage: 120.0
> input.voltage.nominal: 120
> output.voltage: 120.0
> ups.beeper.status: enabled

That all seems ok.

> ups.delay.shutdown: 20
> ups.delay.start: 30

These are suspicious.  Look up what they mean, and if ups.delay.shutdown
is "after the killpower is sent, wait 20s before disabling the inverter"
or if it means "start shutdown after 20s without power".  I bet it's the
first, but there are docs and there is source code.

> ups.load: 6

I'm guessing this is 6% of 1500 VA, or 90 VA.   So you should with good
batteries **and correct config** get much more than 40s, more like 30 minutes.

> ups.mfr: CPS
> ups.model: CP1500AVRLCDa
> ups.productid: 0501
> ups.realpower.nominal: 900
> ups.serial: BHQLW7002402
> ups.status: OL CHRG
> ups.test.result: No test initiated

> ups.timer.shutdown: -60
> ups.timer.start: -60

These are interesting too, and strange.  Figure these out too.

> ups.vendorid: 0764



The other  suggestion is write a script that does (this is pseudocode
not testedd!!0

  while true; do
    output=`choose an output file name from some counter`
    upsc foo > $output
    sleep 1
  done

and then leave that running while you turn off the breaker or power
strip for 15 seconds.  Then analyze/think and report back.

Do not unplug; that disconnects ground.


The other thing you could do is disasemble, extract batteries, charge
each of them up and do a controlled load test at C/20h to 10.5V logging
everything, but I suspect you aren't set up for that.