Nut upsdev - Dec 2005 - APC Back-UPS 500

I'm using nut 2.0.2 from Fedora Core 4 and had some trouble getting my 
APC Back-UPS 500 working. I ended up having to rebuild the RPM myself 
after making some code changes.

I had to increase the upsd synchronization timeout from 5 to 15 seconds. 
It seems like 10 is the sweet spot but allowing a few extra seconds 
doesn't seem to hurt anything. At 5 the UPS would timeout 5 out of 6 times.

The second problem is that my UPS, a USB model using the newhidups 
driver, doesn't send PresentStatus (840002) in its updates. This means 
that ups.status is always empty and upsmon has a fit over it.

My fix was to simply remove "PresentStatus." from the ups.status
entries
in apc-hid.h. I haven't been able to come up with any sort of 
semi-elegant solution for this. My fix could break any UPS that relies 
on PresentStatus for its updates.

This is a pretty old UPS. I worked with Russell back in 2001 (nut-0.45 
era) to get it working once before with the first USB driver (nutusb.c). 
So it may be that it simply isn't complaint to the spec and should be 
ignored. I looked at the spec and it is a tad unclear to me whether it 
is required or not.

I'm open to suggestions.

rob

On 12/29/05, Rob Crittenden <rcrit@greyoak.com>
wrote:
> I'm using nut 2.0.2 from Fedora Core 4 and had some trouble getting my
> APC Back-UPS 500 working. I ended up having to rebuild the RPM myself
> after making some code changes.
>
> I had to increase the upsd synchronization timeout from 5 to 15 seconds.
> It seems like 10 is the sweet spot but allowing a few extra seconds
> doesn't seem to hurt anything. At 5 the UPS would timeout 5 out of 6
times.
Depending on which timeout this is (I don't have the code handy), this
might be something that could be exposed as a configuration variable.
I think some of the MGE USB UPSes take a while as well, due to the
slow internal baud rate, and the low-speed USB transfers.
> The second problem is that my UPS, a USB model using the newhidups
> driver, doesn't send PresentStatus (840002) in its updates. This means
> that ups.status is always empty and upsmon has a fit over it.
>
> My fix was to simply remove "PresentStatus." from the ups.status
entries
> in apc-hid.h. I haven't been able to come up with any sort of
> semi-elegant solution for this. My fix could break any UPS that relies
> on PresentStatus for its updates.
Does the debug output indicate an alternative variable that provides
on battery/online status? (In this case, '-D -D' is probably a decent
debug level for newhidups.)

--
- Charles Lepple