Table of Contents
The primary goal of the Network UPS Tools (NUT) project is to provide support for Power Devices, such as Uninterruptible Power Supplies, Power Distribution Units and Solar Controllers.
NUT provides many control and monitoring features, with a uniform control and management interface.
More than 170 different manufacturers, and several thousands of models are compatible.
This software is the combined effort of many individuals and companies.
This document intend to describe how to install software support for your Power Devices (UPS, PDU, …), and how to use the NUT project. It is not intended to explain what are, nor distinguish the different technologies that exist. For such information, have a look at the General Power Devices Information.
If you wish to discover how everything came together, have a look at the Project History.
Network UPS Tools is a collection of programs which provide a common interface for monitoring and administering UPS, PDU and SCD hardware. It uses a layered approach to connect all of the parts.
Drivers are provided for a wide assortment of equipment. They understand the specific language of each device and map it back to a compatibility layer. This means both an expensive high end UPS, a simple "power strip" PDU, or any other power device can be handled transparently with a uniform management interface.
This information is cached by the network server upsd
, which then
answers queries from the clients. upsd contains a number of access
control features to limit the abilities of the clients. Only authorized
hosts may monitor or control your hardware if you wish. Since the
notion of monitoring over the network is built into the software, you
can hang many systems off one large UPS, and they will all shut down
together. You can also use NUT to power on, off or cycle your data center
nodes, individually or globally through PDU outlets.
Clients such as upsmon
check on the status of the hardware and do things
when necessary. The most important task is shutting down the operating
system cleanly before the UPS runs out of power. Other programs are
also provided to log information regularly, monitor status through your
web browser, and more.
NUT comes pre-packaged for many operating systems and embedded in storage, automation or virtualization appliances, and is also often shipped as the software companion by several UPS vendors. Of course, it is quite normal and supported to build your own — whether for an operating system which lacks it yet, or for an older distribution which lacks the current NUT version; whether to take advantage of new features or to troubleshoot a new UPS deployment with a debugger in hand.
Given its core position at the heart of your systems' lifecycle, we make it a point to have current NUT building and running anywhere, especially where older releases did work before (including "abandonware" like the servers and OSes from the turn of millennium): if those boxes are still alive and in need of power protection, they should be able to get it.
If you like how the NUT project helps protect your systems from power outages, please consider sponsoring or at least "starring" it on GitHub at https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/ - these stars are among metrics which the larger potential sponsors consider when choosing how to help FOSS projects. Keeping the lights shining in such a large non-regression build matrix is a big undertaking!
See acknowledgements of organizations which help with NUT CI and other daily operations for an overview of the shared effort.
As a FOSS project, for over a quarter of a century we welcome contributions of both core code (drivers and other features), build recipes and other integration elements to make it work on your favourite system, documentation revisions to make it more accessible to newcomers, as well as hardware vendor cooperation with first-hand driver and protocol submissions, and just about anything else you can think of.
The Network UPS Tools project is a community-made open-source effort, primarily made and maintained by people donating their spare time.
The support channels are likewise open, with preferred ones being the NUT project issue tracker on GitHub and the NUT Users mailing list, as detailed at https://networkupstools.org/support.html page.
Please keep in mind that any help is provided by community members just like yourself, as a best effort, and subject to their availability and experience. It is expected that you have read the Frequently Asked Questions, looked at the NUT wiki, and have a good grasp about the three-layer design and programs involved in a running deployment of NUT, for a discussion to be constructive and efficient.
Be patient, polite, and prepare to learn and provide information about your NUT deployment (version, configuration, OS…) and the device, to collect logs, and to answer any follow-up questions about your situation.
Finally, note that NUT is packaged and delivered by packaging into numerous operating systems, appliances and monitoring projects, and may be bundled with third-party GUI clients. It may be wise of end-users to identify such cases and ask for help on the most-relevant forum (or several, including the NUT support channels). It is important to highlight that the NUT project releases have for a long time been essentially snapshots of better-tested code, and we do not normally issue patches to "hot-fix" any older releases.
Any improvements of NUT itself are made in the current code base, same as any other feature development, so to receive desired fixes on your system (and/or to check that they do solve your particular issue), expect to be asked to build the recent development iteration from GitHub or work with your appliance vendor to get a software upgrade.
Over time, downstream OS packaging or other integrations which use NUT, may issue patches as new package revisions, or new baseline versions of NUT, according to their release policies. It is not uncommon for distributions, especially "stable" flavours, to be a few years behind upstream projects.
If you are installing these programs for the first time, go read the installation instructions to find out how to do that. This document contains more information on what all of this stuff does.
When upgrading from an older version, always check the upgrading notes to see what may have changed. Compatibility issues and other changes will be listed there to ease the process.
Once NUT is installed, refer to the configuration notes for directions.
This is just an overview of the software. You should read the man pages, included example configuration files, and auxiliary documentation for the parts that you intend to use.
These programs are designed to share information over the network. In
the examples below, localhost
is used as the hostname. This can also
be an IP address or a fully qualified domain name. You can specify a
port number if your upsd process runs on another port.
In the case of the program upsc
, to view the variables on the UPS called
sparky on the upsd
server running on the local machine, you’d do this:
/usr/local/ups/bin/upsc sparky@localhost
The default port number is 3493. You can change this with "configure --with-port" at compile-time. To make a client talk to upsd on a specific port, add it after the hostname with a colon, like this:
/usr/local/ups/bin/upsc sparky@localhost:1234
This is handy when you have a mixed environment and some of the systems are on different ports.
The general form for UPS identifiers is this:
<upsname>[@<hostname>[:<port>]]
Keep this in mind when viewing the examples below.
This package is broken down into several categories:
These programs provide support for specific UPS models. They understand the protocols and port specifications which define status information and convert it to a form that upsd can understand.
To configure drivers, edit ups.conf. For this example, we’ll have a UPS
called "sparky" that uses the apcsmart driver and is connected to
/dev/ttyS1
. That’s the second serial port on most Linux-based systems.
The entry in ups.conf
looks like this:
[sparky] driver = apcsmart port = /dev/ttyS1
To start and stop drivers, use upsdrvctl of upsdrvsvcctl (installed on operating systems with a service management framework supported by NUT). By default, it will start or stop every UPS in the config file:
/usr/local/ups/sbin/upsdrvctl start /usr/local/ups/sbin/upsdrvctl stop
However, you can also just start or stop one by adding its name:
/usr/local/ups/sbin/upsdrvctl start sparky /usr/local/ups/sbin/upsdrvctl stop sparky
On operating systems with a supported service management framework, you might wrap your NUT drivers into individual services instances with:
/usr/local/ups/sbin/upsdrvsvcctl resync
and then manage those service instances with commands like:
/usr/local/ups/sbin/upsdrvsvcctl start sparky /usr/local/ups/sbin/upsdrvsvcctl stop sparky
To find the driver name for your device, refer to the section below called "HARDWARE SUPPORT TABLE".
Some drivers may require additional settings to properly communicate with your hardware. If it doesn’t detect your UPS by default, check the driver’s man page or help (-h) to see which options are available.
For example, the usbhid-ups driver allows you to use USB serial numbers to distinguish between units via the "serial" configuration option. To use this feature, just add another line to your ups.conf section for that UPS:
[sparky] driver = usbhid-ups port = auto serial = 1234567890
The Hardware Compatibility List is available in the source directory (nut-X.Y.Z/data/driver.list), and is generally distributed with packages. For example, it is available on Debian systems as:
/usr/share/nut/driver.list
This table is also available online.
If your driver has vanished, see the FAQ and Upgrading notes.
NUT provides several generic drivers that support a variety of very similar models.
The genericups
driver supports many serial models that use the same basic
principle to communicate with the computer. This is known as "contact
closure", and basically involves raising or lowering signals to indicate
power status.
This type of UPS tends to be cheaper, and only provides the very simplest data about power and battery status. Advanced features like battery charge readings and such require a "smart" UPS and a driver which supports it.
See the genericups(8) man page for more information.
The usbhid-ups
driver attempts to communicate with USB HID Power Device
Class (PDC) UPSes. These units generally implement the same basic protocol,
with minor variations in the exact set of supported attributes. This driver
also applies several correction factors when the UPS firmware reports values
with incorrect scale factors.
See the usbhid-ups(8) man page for more information.
The nutdrv_qx
driver supports the Megatec / Q1 protocol that is used in
many brands (Blazer, Energy Sistem, Fenton Technologies, Mustek, Voltronic
Power and many others).
See the nutdrv_qx(8) man page for more information.
The snmp-ups
driver handles various SNMP enabled devices, from many
different manufacturers. In SNMP terms, snmp-ups
is a manager, that
monitors SNMP agents.
See the snmp-ups(8) man page for more information.
The powerman-pdu
is a bridge to the PowerMan daemon, thus handling all
PowerMan supported devices. The PowerMan project supports several serial
and networked PDU, along with Blade and IPMI enabled servers.
See the powerman-pdu(8) man page for more information.
The apcupsd-ups
driver is a bridge to the Apcupsd daemon, thus handling
all Apcupsd supported devices. The Apcupsd project supports many serial,
USB and networked APC UPS.
See the apcupsd-ups(8) man page for more information.
upsdrvctl can also shut down (power down) all of your UPS hardware.
If you play around with this command, expect your filesystems to die. Don’t power off your computers unless they’re ready for it:
/usr/local/ups/sbin/upsdrvctl shutdown /usr/local/ups/sbin/upsdrvctl shutdown sparky
You should read the Configuring automatic UPS shutdowns chapter to learn more about when to use this feature. If called at the wrong time, you may cause data loss by turning off a system with a filesystem mounted read-write.
NUT also provides an advanced support for power distribution units.
You should read the NUT outlets management and PDU notes chapter to learn more about when to use this feature.
upsd
is responsible for passing data from the drivers to the client
programs via the network. It should be run immediately after upsdrvctl
in your system’s startup scripts.
upsd
should be kept running whenever possible, as it is the only source
of status information for the monitoring clients like upsmon
.
upsmon
provides the essential feature that you expect to find in UPS
monitoring software: safe shutdowns when the power fails.
In the layered scheme of NUT software, it is a client. It has this separate section in the documentation since it is so important.
You configure it by telling it about UPSes that you want to monitor in upsmon.conf. Each UPS can be defined as one of two possible types: a "primary" or "secondary".
The monitored UPS possibly supplies power to this system running upsmon
,
but more importantly — this system can manage the UPS (typically, this
instance of upsmon
runs on the same system as the upsd
and driver(s)):
it is capable and responsible for shutting it down when the battery is
depleted (or in another approach, lingering to deplete it or to tell the
UPS to reboot its load after too much time has elapsed and this system
is still alive — meaning wall power returned at a "wrong" moment).
The shutdown of this (primary) system itself, as well as eventually an UPS shutdown, occurs after any secondary systems ordered to shut down first have disconnected, or a critical urgency threshold was passed.
If your UPS is plugged directly into a system’s serial or USB port, the
upsmon
process on that system should define its relation to that UPS
as a primary. It may be more complicated for higher-end UPSes with a
shared network management capability (typically via SNMP) or several
serial/USB ports that can be used simultaneously, and depends on what
vendors and drivers implement. Setups with several competing primaries
(for redundancy) are technically possible, if each one runs its own
full stack of NUT, but results can be random (currently NUT does not
provide a way to coordinate several entities managing the same device).
For a typical home user, there’s one computer connected to one UPS.
That means you would run on the same computer the whole NUT stack — a suitable driver, upsd
, and upsmon
in primary mode.
The monitored UPS may supply power to the system running upsmon
(or
alternatively, it may be a monitoring station with zero PSUs fed by
that UPS), but more importantly, this system can’t manage the UPS — e.g. shut it down directly (through a locally running NUT driver).
Use this mode when you run multiple computers on the same UPS. Obviously, only one can be connected to the serial or USB port on a typical UPS, and that system is the primary. Everything else is a secondary.
For a typical home user, there’s one computer connected to one UPS.
That means you run a driver, upsd
, and upsmon
in primary mode.
More information on configuring upsmon can be found in these places:
upsmon.conf
that comes with the package
Clients talk to upsd over the network and do useful things with the data from the drivers. There are tools for command line access, and a few special clients which can be run through your web server as CGI programs.
For more details on specific programs, refer to their man pages.
upsc
is a simple client that will display the values of variables known
to upsd
and your UPS drivers. It will list every variable by default,
or just one if you specify an additional argument. This can be useful
in shell scripts for monitoring something without writing your own
network code.
upsc
is a quick way to find out if your driver(s) and upsd are working
together properly. Just run upsc <ups>
to see what’s going on, i.e.:
morbo:~$ upsc sparky@localhost ambient.humidity: 035.6 ambient.humidity.alarm.maximum: NO,NO ambient.humidity.alarm.minimum: NO,NO ambient.temperature: 25.14 ...
If you are interested in writing a simple client that monitors upsd
,
the source code for upsc
is a good way to learn about using the
upsclient functions.
See the upsc(8) man page and NUT command and variable naming scheme for more information.
upslog
will write status information from upsd
to a file at set
intervals. You can use this to generate graphs or reports with other
programs such as gnuplot
.
upsrw
allows you to display and change the read/write variables in your
UPS hardware. Not all devices or drivers implement this, so this may
not have any effect on your system.
A driver that supports read/write variables will give results like this:
$ upsrw sparky@localhost ( many skipped ) [ups.test.interval] Interval between self tests Type: ENUM Option: "1209600" Option: "604800" SELECTED Option: "0" ( more skipped )
On the other hand, one that doesn’t support them won’t print anything:
$ upsrw fenton@gearbox ( nothing )
upsrw
requires administrator powers to change settings in the hardware.
Refer to upsd.users(5) for information on defining
users in upsd
.
Some UPS hardware and drivers support the notion of an instant command - a feature such as starting a battery test, or powering off the load. You can use upscmd to list or invoke instant commands if your hardware/drivers support them.
Use the -l command to list them, like this:
$ upscmd -l sparky@localhost Instant commands supported on UPS [sparky@localhost]: load.on - Turn on the load immediately test.panel.start - Start testing the UPS panel calibrate.start - Start run time calibration calibrate.stop - Stop run time calibration ...
upscmd
requires administrator powers to start instant commands.
To define users and passwords in upsd
, see
upsd.users(5).
The CGI programs are clients that run through your web server. They allow you to see UPS status and perform certain administrative commands from any web browser. Javascript and cookies are not required.
These programs are not installed or compiled by default. To compile
and install them, first run configure --with-cgi
, then do make
and
make install
. If you receive errors about "gd" during configure, go
get it and install it before continuing.
You can get the source here:
In the event that you need libpng or zlib in order to compile gd, they can be found at these URLs:
The CGI programs use hosts.conf to see if they are allowed to talk to a host. This keeps malicious visitors from creating queries from your web server to random hosts on the Internet.
If you get error messages that say "Access to that host is not authorized", you’re probably missing an entry in your hosts.conf.
upsstats
generates web pages from HTML templates, and plugs in status
information in the right places. It looks like a distant relative of
APC’s old Powerchute interface. You can use it to monitor several
systems or just focus on one.
It also can generate IMG references to upsimage
.
This is usually called by upsstats via IMG SRC tags to draw either the utility or outgoing voltage, battery charge percent, or load percent.
upsset
provides several useful administration functions through a web
interface. You can use upsset
to kick off instant commands on your UPS
hardware like running a battery test. You can also use it to change
variables in your UPS that accept user-specified values.
Essentially, upsset
provides the functions of upsrw
and upscmd
, but
with a happy pointy-clicky interface.
upsset
will not run until you convince it that you have secured your
system. You must secure your CGI path so that random interlopers
can’t run this program remotely. See the upsset.conf
file. Once you
have secured the directory, you can enable this program in that
configuration file. It is not active by default.
The version numbers historically worked like this: if the middle number is odd, it’s a development tree, otherwise it is the stable tree.
The past stable trees were 1.0, 1.2, 1.4, 2.0, 2.2 and 2.4, with the latest such stable tree designated 2.6. The development trees were 1.1, 1.3, 1.5, 2.1 and 2.3. Since the 2.4 release, there is no real separate development branch anymore since the code is available through a revision control system (namely, Git — or actually Subversion back then), development happens in feature branches that are eventually merged into the main trunk, and its snapshots become published releases. As a result, subsequent versions (2.7 and 2.8) were released without regard for even/odd values of the minor version component.
Since 2.7 line of releases, sources are tracked in Git revision control system, with the project ecosystem being hosted on GitHub, and any code improvements or other contributions merged through common pull request approach and custom NUT CI testing on multiple platforms.
Major release jumps are mostly due to large changes to the features list. There have also been a number of architectural changes which may not be noticeable to most users, but which can impact developers.
Since NUT v2.8.2 or so, development iterations have additional version
components, to account for the amount of commits on the main branch
(master
) since the last known Git tag, and amount of commits on the
developed feature branch that are unique to it compared to main branch.
This allows for a reasonably growing version of stable baseline and
local development, so that experimental packages can be installed as
upgrades (or well-exposed downgrades).
While the NUT releases retain the semantic versioning three-component standard, interim builds (trunk snapshots and development branches) can expose a much more complex structure with the amount of commits in the trunk since last release, and amount of commits on the branch unique to it (not in the trunk). Additional data may include overall amount of commits in the current build since last release, and the git commit has identifier of the built code base.
More details can be seen in docs/nut-versioning.adoc
file in the
NUT source code base.
The network protocol for the current version of NUT should be backwards-compatible all the way back to version 1.4. A newer client should fail gracefully when querying an older server.
If you need more details about cross-compatibility of older NUT releases (1.x vs. 2.x), please see the Project history chapter.
If you are in need of help, refer to the Support instructions in the user manual.
Additional documentation can be found in:
The many people who have participated in creating and improving NUT are listed in the user manual acknowledgements appendix.
We would like to highlight some organizations which provide continuous support to the NUT project (and many other FOSS projects) on technological and organizational sides, such as helping keep the donations transparent, NUT CI farm afloat, and public resources visible. Thanks for keeping the clocks ticking, day and night:
The "NetworkUPSTools" organization on GitHub arranges a lot of things, including source code hosting for NUT itself and several related projects, team management, projects, issue and pull request discussions, sponsorship, nut-website rendering and hosting, some automated actions, and more… | |
The Jenkins CI project and its huge plugin ecosystem provides the technological foundation for the largest island of the self-hosted NUT CI farm. There is a fair amount of cross-pollination between the upstream project and community, and the development done originally for the NUT CI farm. See more at Jenkins is the way to build multi-platform NUT article. | |
Fosshost provided virtual machines where the multi-platform NUT CI farm with a jenkins-dynamatrix setup runs to arrange builds in numerous operating environments and a lot of toolkit versions and implementations. Some workers running on NUT community members' machines can also dial in to provide an example of their favourite platforms. Literally hundreds of NUT builds run for each iteration, to make sure NUT can always build and work everywhere. This allows us to ensure that NUT remains portable across two decades' worth of operating systems, compilers, script interpreters, tools and third-party dependencies. | |
The CircleCI NUT pipeline allows us to test NUT CI builds on MacOS. | |
The AppVeyor NUT pipeline allows us to test NUT CI builds on Windows (and publish preview tarballs with binaries). | |
The DigitalOcean droplets allow us to host NUT CI farm Jenkins controller and the build agents for multiple operating systems. | |
Gandi.Net took up the costs of NUT DNS hosting. | |
https://opencollective.com/networkupstools allows us to arrange monetary donations and spending, with public transparency of everything that happens. |
NUT provides many features, and is always improving. Thus this list may lag behind the current code.
Features frequently appear during the development cycles, so be sure to look at the release notes and change logs to see the latest additions.
Various communication types and many protocols are supported with the same common interface:
Be sure to plug your network’s physical hardware (switches, hubs, routers, bridges, …) into the UPS!
upsdrvctl start
.
These are the most common situations for monitoring UPS hardware. Other ways are possible, but they are mostly variations of these four.
These examples show serial communications for simplicity, but USB or SNMP or any other monitoring is also possible.
One UPS, one computer. This is also known as "Standalone" configuration.
This is the configuration that most users will use. You need at least a
driver, upsd
, and upsmon
running.
One UPS, multiple computers. Only one of them can actually talk to the UPS directly. That’s where the network comes in:
upsd
, and upsmon
in
"primary" mode.
upsmon
in "secondary" mode which all
connect to upsd
on Primary.
This is useful when you have a very large UPS that’s capable of running multiple systems simultaneously. There is no longer the need to buy a bunch of individual UPSes or "sharing" hardware, since this software will handle the sharing for you.
Some systems have multiple power supplies and cords. You typically find
this on high-end servers that allow hot-swap and other fun features.
In this case, you run multiple drivers (one per UPS), a single upsd
,
and a single upsmon
(as a primary for both UPS 1 and UPS 2)
This software understands that some of these servers can also run with some of the supplies gone. For this reason, every UPS is assigned a "power value" — the quantity of power supplies that it feeds on this system.
The total available "power value" is compared to the minimum that is required for that hardware. For example, if you have 3 power supplies and 3 UPSes, but only 2 supplies must be running at any given moment, the minimum would be 2.
This means that you can safely lose any one UPS and the software will handle it properly by remaining online and not causing a shut down.
You can even have a UPS that has the serial port connected to a system that it’s not feeding. Sometimes a PC will be close to a UPS that needs to be monitored, so it’s drafted to supply a serial port for the purpose. This PC may in fact be getting its own power from some other UPS. This is not a problem for the set-up.
The first system ("mixed") is a Primary for UPS 1, but is only monitoring UPS 2. The other systems are Secondaries of UPS 2.
The current list of hardware supported by NUT can be viewed here.
This software has been reported to run on:
Windows:
NUT is also often embedded into third-party projects like OpenWRT (or similar) based routers, NAS and other appliances, monitoring systems like Home Assistant, and provided or suggested by some UPS vendors as their software companion.
Your system will probably run it too. You just need a good C compiler and possibly some more packages to gain access to the serial ports. Other features, such as USB / SNMP / whatever, will also need extra software installed.
Success reports are welcomed to keep this list accurate.
Given its core position at the heart of your systems' lifecycle, we make it a point to have current NUT building and running anywhere, especially where older releases did work before (including "abandonware" like the servers and OSes from the turn of millennium): if those boxes are still alive and in need of power protection, they should be able to get it.
If you like how the NUT project helps protect your systems from power outages, please consider sponsoring or at least "starring" it on GitHub at https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/ - these stars are among metrics which the larger potential sponsors consider when choosing how to help FOSS projects. Keeping the lights shining in such a large non-regression build matrix is a big undertaking!
See acknowledgements of organizations which help with NUT CI and other daily operations for an overview of the shared effort.
As a FOSS project, for over a quarter of a century we welcome contributions of both core code (drivers and other features), build recipes and other integration elements to make it work on your favourite system, documentation revisions to make it more accessible to newcomers, as well as hardware vendor cooperation with first-hand driver and protocol submissions, and just about anything else you can think of.
The Network UPS Tools project is a community-made open-source effort, primarily made and maintained by people donating their spare time.
The support channels are likewise open, with preferred ones being the NUT project issue tracker on GitHub and the NUT Users mailing list, as detailed at https://networkupstools.org/support.html page.
Please keep in mind that any help is provided by community members just like yourself, as a best effort, and subject to their availability and experience. It is expected that you have read the Frequently Asked Questions, looked at the NUT wiki, and have a good grasp about the three-layer design and programs involved in a running deployment of NUT, for a discussion to be constructive and efficient.
Be patient, polite, and prepare to learn and provide information about your NUT deployment (version, configuration, OS…) and the device, to collect logs, and to answer any follow-up questions about your situation.
Finally, note that NUT is packaged and delivered by packaging into numerous operating systems, appliances and monitoring projects, and may be bundled with third-party GUI clients. It may be wise of end-users to identify such cases and ask for help on the most-relevant forum (or several, including the NUT support channels). It is important to highlight that the NUT project releases have for a long time been essentially snapshots of better-tested code, and we do not normally issue patches to "hot-fix" any older releases.
Any improvements of NUT itself are made in the current code base, same as any other feature development, so to receive desired fixes on your system (and/or to check that they do solve your particular issue), expect to be asked to build the recent development iteration from GitHub or work with your appliance vendor to get a software upgrade.
Over time, downstream OS packaging or other integrations which use NUT, may issue patches as new package revisions, or new baseline versions of NUT, according to their release policies. It is not uncommon for distributions, especially "stable" flavours, to be a few years behind upstream projects.
This section presents the different methods to download NUT.
You should always use PGP/GPG to verify the signatures before using any source code.
You can use the following procedure. to do so.
The development tree is available through a Git repository hosted at GitHub.
To retrieve the current development tree, use the following command:
:; git clone git://github.com/networkupstools/nut.git
OPTIONALLY you can then fetch known git tags, so semantic versions look better (based off a recent release):
:; cd nut :; git fetch --tags --all
The configure
script and its dependencies are not stored in Git. To generate
them, ensure that autoconf, automake and libtool are installed, then run the
following script in the directory you just checked out:
:; ./autogen.sh
it is optionally recommended to have Python 2.x or 3.x, and Perl, to
generate some files included into the configure
script, presence is checked
by autotools when it is generated. Neutered files can be just "touched" to
pass the autogen.sh
if these interpreters are not available, and effectively
skip those parts of the build later on — autogen.sh
will then advise which
special environment variables to export
in your situation and re-run it.
Then refer to the NUT user manual for more information.
You can browse the "vanilla NUT" code at the Main GitHub repository for NUT sources, and some possibly modified copies as part of packaging recipe sources of operating system distributions, as listed below.
GitHub has several download links for repository snapshots (for particular tags
or branches), but you will need a number of tools such as autoconf, automake
and libtool to use these snapshots to generate the configure
script and some
other files.
After you configure
the source workspace, a make dist-hash
recipe would
create the snapshot tarballs which do not require the auto* tools, and their
checksum files, such as those available on the NUT website and attached to
GitHub Releases page.
The only official releases from this project are source code.
NUT is already available in the following operating systems (and likely more):
Linux:
BSD systems:
Mac OS X:
illumos/Solaris:
Windows (complete port, Beta):
NUT client for VMware ESXi (several versions of both; offsite, by René Garcia).
Since the hypervisor manager environment lacks access to hardware ports, this
package only includes the upsmon
client integration, and a NUT server must
run in a VM with passed-through ports.
See NUT and VMware (ESXi) page on NUT Wiki for more community-contributed details.
Note that the VIB package versioning is independent of NUT or VMware versions, they are however mentioned in downloadable file names. As of this writing, there are builds spanning VMware ESXi 5.0-8.0 and NUT 2.7.4-2.8.0.
This module is provided "as is" and is not approved by VMware, you may lose VMware support if you install it. Use it at your own risks.
This chapter describes the various methods for installing Network UPS Tools.
Whenever it is possible, prefer installing from packages. Packagers have done an excellent and hard work at improving NUT integration into their operating system. On the other hand, distributions and appliances tend to package "official releases" of projects such as NUT, and so do not deliver latest and greatest fixes, new drivers, bugs and other features.
Stable distributions also tend to deliver minor fixes to the version of third-party software (like NUT) a particular release of the operating system has initially delivered, so those release lines can be years behind development in terms of new features (or bug fixes, if they are not trivial to patch into the old code base snapshot used to create the package).
These are the essential steps for compiling and installing this software
from distribution archives (usually "release tarballs") which include a
pre-built copy of the configure
script and some other generated source
files.
To build NUT from a Git checkout you may need some additional tools
(referenced just a bit below) and run ./autogen.sh
to generate the
needed files. For common developer iterations, porting to new platforms,
or in-place testing, running the ./ci_build.sh
script can be helpful.
The "Building NUT for in-place upgrades or non-disruptive tests" section details some more hints about such workflow, including some
systemd
integration.
The NUT Packager Guide, which presents the best practices for installing and integrating NUT, is also a good reading.
The NUT Quality Assurance Guide (or docs/config-prereqs.txt
in NUT sources for up-to-date information)
document suggests prerequisite packages with tools and dependencies
available and needed to build and test as much as possible of NUT on
numerous platforms, written from perspective of CI testing (if you
are interested in getting updated drivers for a particular device,
you might select a sub-set of those suggestions).
This "Config Prereqs" document for latest NUT iteration can be found at
https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/blob/master/docs/config-prereqs.txt
or as docs/config-prereqs.txt
in your build workspace (from Git or tarball).
by default, your system probably won’t find the man pages, since they install to /usr/local/ups/man. You can fix this by editing your MANPATH, or just do this:
man -M /usr/local/ups/man <man page>
Create at least one system user and a group for running this software. You might call them "ups" and "nut". The exact names aren’t important as long as you are consistent.
The process for doing this varies from one system to the next, and explaining how to add users is beyond the scope of this document.
For the purposes of this document, the user name and group name will be ups and nut respectively.
Be sure the new user is a member of the new group! If you forget to do this, you will have problems later on when you try to start upsd.
Configure the source tree for your system. Add the --with-user and --with-group switch to set the user name and group that you created above.
./configure --with-user=ups --with-group=nut
If you need any other switches for configure, add them here. For example:
See Configure options from the User Manual, docs/configure.txt or ./configure --help for all the available options.
If you alter paths with additional switches, be sure to use those new paths while reading the rest of the steps.
Reference: Configure options from the User Manual.
make
This will build the NUT client and server programs and the selected drivers. It will also build any other features that were selected during configuration step above.
NUT is regularly tested with GNU, BSD and Sun implementations of make
.
You should now gain privileges for installing software if necessary, e.g.:
su -
or prefix installation (not build/check!) commands with sudo
, e.g.:
sudo make install ...
If you install NUT for direct consumption on the system that has just
built it from source, you might be aided for some of the steps listed
and explained below by running (as root
):
make install-as-root
This should not only install the software, but also create directories such as the state path, assign ownership and access permissions to certain directories and sample configuration files which NUT user and/or group accounts should be able to read and/or write, and, on some platforms, also (re-)start the NUT daemons/services.
See above "System User creation", that should be done first!
Install the files to a system level directory:
make install
This will install the compiled programs and man pages, as well as some data files required by NUT. Any optional features selected during configuration will also be installed.
This will also install sample versions of the NUT configuration files. Sample files are installed with names like ups.conf.sample so they will not overwrite any existing real config files you may have created.
If you are packaging this software, then you will probably want to use the DESTDIR variable to redirect the build into another place, also known as a "prototype directory" or a "staging area", i.e.:
make DESTDIR=/tmp/package install make DESTDIR=/tmp/package install-conf
See above about make install-as-root
, if you use that — skip
this step here.
Create the state path directory for the driver(s) and server to use for storing UPS status data and other auxiliary files, and make it group-writable by the group of the system user you created, e.g.:
mkdir -p /var/state/ups chmod 0770 /var/state/ups chown root:nut /var/state/ups
Set ownership data and permissions on your serial or USB ports that go to your UPS hardware. Be sure to limit access to just the user you created earlier.
These examples assume the second serial port (ttyS1) on a typical Slackware system. On FreeBSD, that would be cuaa1. Serial ports vary greatly, so yours may be called something else.
chmod 0660 /dev/ttyS1 chown root:nut /dev/ttyS1
The setup for USB ports is slightly more complicated. Device files for USB devices, such as /proc/bus/usb/002/001, are usually created "on the fly" when a device is plugged in, and disappear when the device is disconnected. Moreover, the names of these device files can change randomly. To set up the correct permissions for the USB device, you may need to set up (operating system dependent) hotplugging scripts. Sample scripts and information are provided in the scripts/hotplug and scripts/udev directories. For most users, the hotplugging scripts will be installed automatically by "make install".
(If you want to try if a driver works without setting up hotplugging, you can add the "-u root" option to upsd, upsmon, and drivers; this should allow you to follow the below instructions. However, don’t forget to set up the correct permissions later!).
If you are using something like udev or devd, make sure these permissions stay set across a reboot. If they revert to the old values, your drivers may fail to start.
You are now ready to configure NUT, and start testing and using it.
You can jump directly to the NUT configuration.
The NUT GitHub Wiki article at https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/wiki/Building-NUT-for-in%E2%80%90place-upgrades-or-non%E2%80%90disruptive-tests may contain some more hints as contributed by the community.
Since late 2022/early 2023 NUT codebase supports "in-place" builds which try their best to discover the configuration of an earlier build (configuration and run-time paths and OS accounts involved, maybe an exact configuration if stored in deployed binaries).
This optional mode is primarily intended for several use-cases:
Replace an existing deployment, e.g. if OS-provided packages deliver obsolete code, to use newer NUT locally in "production mode".
Note that "just testing" often involves building the codebase and new drivers or tools in question, and running them right from the build workspace (without installing into the system and so risking an unpredictable-stability state). In case of testing new driver builds, note that you would need to stop the normally running instances to free up the communications resources (USB/serial ports, etc.), run the new driver program in data-dump mode, and restart the normal systems operations.
Such tests still benefit from matching the build configuration to what is already deployed, in order to request same configuration files and system access permissions (e.g. to own device nodes for physical-media ports involved, and to read the production configuration files).
The NUT Quality Assurance Guide (or docs/config-prereqs.txt
in NUT sources for up-to-date information)
document details tools and dependencies that were added on NUT CI build
environments, which now cover many operating systems. This should
provide a decent starting point for the build on yours (PRs to update
the document are welcome!)
Note that unlike distribution tarballs, Git sources do not include a
configure
script and some other files — these should be generated by
running autogen.sh
(or ci_build.sh
that calls it).
To build the current tip of development iterations (usually after PR merges that passed CI, reviews and/or other tests), just clone the NUT repository and "master" branch should get checked out by default (also can request that explicitly, per example posted below).
If you want to quickly test a particular pull request, see the link on
top of the PR page that says ... wants to merge ... from : ...
and
copy the proposed-source URL of that "from" part.
For example, in some PR this says jimklimov:issue-1234
and links to
https://github.com/jimklimov/nut/tree/issue-1234
.
For manual git-cloning, just paste that URL into the shell and replace
the /tree/
with "-b
" CLI option for branch selection; it also helps
to keep the workspace directory name dedicated to that PR, like this:
:; cd /tmp ### Checkout https://github.com/jimklimov/nut/tree/issue-1234 :; git clone https://github.com/jimklimov/nut -b issue-1234 nut-issue-1234 :; cd nut-issue-1234 ### OPTIONALLY fetch known git tags, so semantic versions look better :; git fetch --tags --all ### Proceed with build (common instructions below)
This uses the ci_build.sh
script to arrange some rituals and
settings, in this case primarily to default the choice of drivers to
auto-detection of what can be built, and to skip building documentation.
Also note that this script supports many other scenarios for CI and
developers, managed by BUILD_TYPE
and other environment variables,
which are not explored here.
An "in-place" testing build and run would probably go along these lines:
:; cd /tmp :; git clone -b master https://github.com/networkupstools/nut :; cd nut ### OPTIONALLY fetch known git tags, so semantic versions look better :; git fetch --tags --all ### Proceed with build :; ./ci_build.sh inplace ### Temporarily stop your original drivers :; ./drivers/nutdrv_qx -a DEVNAME_FROM_UPS_CONF -d1 -DDDDDD \ # -x override...=... -x subdriver=... ### Can start back your original drivers ### Analyze and/or post back the data-dump
To probe a device for which you do not have an ups.conf
section
yet, you must specify -s name
and all config options (including
port
) on command-line with -x
arguments, e.g.:
:; ./drivers/nutdrv_qx -s temp-ups \ -d1 -DDDDDD -x port=auto \ -x vendorid=... -x productid=... \ -x subdriver=...
While ci_build.sh inplace
can be a viable option for preparation of
local builds, you may want to have precise control over configure
options (e.g. choice of required drivers, or enabled documentation).
A sound starting point would be to track down packaging recipes used by
your distribution (e.g.
RPM spec
or
DEB rules
files, etc.) to detail the same paths if you intend to replace those,
and copy the parameters for configure
script from there — especially
if your system is not currently running NUT v2.8.1 or newer (which embeds
this information to facilitate in-place upgrade rebuilds).
Note that the primary focus of in-place automated configuration mode is
about critical run-time options, such as OS user accounts, configuration
location and state/PID paths, so it alone might not replace your driver
binaries that the package would put into an obscure location like
/lib/nut
. It would however install init-scripts or systemd units that
would refer to new locations specified by the current build, so such old
binaries would just consume disk space but not run.
It is recommended to first try installing into a prototyping area, so you can review which files get delivered and perhaps which locations you may have to tune for a more tightly tailored replacement of an older (packaged) installation, in case whole swathes of files that you expect to be present in the current system (libraries, drivers, docs) are not getting installed by the new build into same path names:
:; rm -rf /tmp/nut ; make DESTDIR=/tmp/nut install -j 8 :; (cd /tmp/nut && find . | sort) | while read N ; \ do [ -e "/$N" ] || echo "=== MISSING: /$N" >&2 ; done
For deployments on OSes with systemd
see the next section.
This goes similar to usual build and install from Git:
:; cd /tmp :; git clone https://github.com/networkupstools/nut :; cd nut ### OPTIONALLY fetch known git tags, so semantic versions look better :; git fetch --tags --all ### Proceed with build :; ./autogen.sh :; ./configure --enable-inplace-runtime # --maybe-some-other-options :; make -j 4 all && make -j 4 check && sudo make install
Note that make install
does not currently handle all the nuances that
packaging installation scripts would, such as customizing filesystem
object ownership, daemon restarts, etc. or even creating locations like
/var/state/ups
and /var/run/nut
as part of the make
target (but
e.g. the delivered systemd-tmpfiles
configuration can handle that for
a large part of the audience). This aspect is tracked as
issue #1298
At this point you should revise the locations for PID files
(e.g. /var/run/nut
) and pipe files (e.g. /var/state/ups
) that they
exist and permissions remain suitable for NUT run-time user selected by
your configuration, and typically stop your original NUT drivers,
data-server (upsd) and upsmon, and restart them using the new binaries.
For modern Linux distributions with systemd
this replacement procedure
could be enhanced like below, to also re-enable services (creating proper
symlinks) and to get them started:
:; cd /tmp :; git clone https://github.com/networkupstools/nut :; cd nut ### OPTIONALLY fetch known git tags, so semantic versions look better :; git fetch --tags --all ### Proceed with build :; ./autogen.sh :; ./configure --enable-inplace-runtime # --maybe-some-other-options :; make -j 4 all && make -j 4 check && \ { sudo systemctl stop nut-monitor nut-server || true ; } && \ { sudo systemctl stop nut-driver.service || true ; } && \ { sudo systemctl stop nut-driver.target || true ; } && \ { sudo systemctl stop nut.target || true ; } && \ sudo make install && \ sudo systemctl daemon-reload && \ sudo systemd-tmpfiles --create && \ sudo systemctl disable nut.target nut-driver.target \ nut-monitor nut-server nut-driver-enumerator.path \ nut-driver-enumerator.service && \ sudo systemctl enable nut.target nut-driver.target \ nut-monitor nut-server nut-driver-enumerator.path \ nut-driver-enumerator.service && \ { sudo systemctl restart udev || true ; } && \ sudo systemctl restart nut-driver-enumerator.service \ nut-monitor nut-server
Note the several attempts to stop old service units — naming did change
from 2.7.4 and older releases, through 2.8.0, and up to current codebase.
Most of the NUT units are now WantedBy=nut.target
(which is in turn
WantedBy=multi-user.target
and so bound to system startup). You should
only systemctl enable
those units you need on this system — this allows
it to not start the daemons you do not need (e.g. not run upsd
NUT data
server on systems which are only upsmon secondary
clients).
The nut-driver-enumerator
units (and corresponding shell script) are
part of a new feature introduced in NUT 2.8.0, which automatically
discovers ups.conf
sections and changes to their contents, and manages
instances of a nut-driver@.service
definition.
You may also have to restart (or reload if supported) some system services
if your updates impact them, like udev
for updates USB support (note also
PR #1342 regarding
the change from udev.rules
to udev.hwdb
file with NUT v2.8.0 or later — you may have to remove the older file manually).
If you are regularly building NUT from GitHub "master" branch, or iterating local development branches of your own, you may get away with shorter constructs to just restart the services after installing newly built files (if you know there were no changes to unit file definitions and dependencies), e.g.:
:; cd /tmp :; git clone https://github.com/networkupstools/nut :; cd nut :; git checkout -b issue-1234 ### your PR branch name, arbitrary ### OPTIONALLY fetch known git tags, so semantic versions look better :; git fetch --tags --all ### Proceed with build :; ./autogen.sh :; ./configure --enable-inplace-runtime # --maybe-some-other-options ### Iterate your code changes (e.g. PR draft), build and install with: :; make -j 4 all && make -j 4 check && \ sudo make install && \ sudo systemctl daemon-reload && \ sudo systemd-tmpfiles --create && \ sudo systemctl restart \ nut-driver-enumerator.service nut-monitor nut-server
Note that to contribute your work back to upstream NUT codebase, you would
need to create a "fork" of https://github.com/networkupstools/nut on GitHub,
then git remote add USERNAME https://github.com/USERNAME/nut
, maybe refresh
the workspace index with git fetch --all
, and finally git push USERNAME
(possibly follow further instructions from git
tooling) to create the
pull request. For more details, see docs/developers.txt
in NUT sources.
You can jump directly to the NUT configuration if you need to revise the settings for your new NUT version, take advantage of new configuration options, etc.
Check the NEWS.adoc
and UPGRADING.adoc
files
in your checked-out Git workspace to review features that should be present
in your new build.
This chapter describes the specific installation steps when using binary packages that exist on various major systems.
NUT is packaged and well maintained in these systems. The official Debian packager used to be part of the NUT Team.
Using your preferred method (apt-get, aptitude, Synaptic, …), install the nut package, and optionally the following:
Configuration files are located in /etc/nut. nut.conf(5) must be edited to be able to invoke /etc/init.d/nut
Ubuntu users can access the APT URL installation by clicking on this link.
NUT is packaged and well maintained in these systems. The official Mandriva packager is part of the NUT Team.
Using your preferred method (urpmi, RPMdrake, …), install one of the two below packages:
Optionally, you can also install the following:
NUT is packaged and well maintained in these systems. The official SUSE packager is part of the NUT Team.
Install the nut-classic package, and optionally the following:
SUSE and openSUSE users can use the one-click install method to install NUT.
NUT is packaged and well maintained in these systems. The official Red Hat packager is part of the NUT Team.
Using your preferred method (yum, Add/Remove Software, …), install one of the two below packages:
Optionally, you can also install the following:
You can either install NUT as a binary package or as a port.
The port is located under sysutils/nut
.
Use make config
to select configuration options, e.g. to build the
optional CGI scripts.
To install it, use:
# make install clean
For USB UPS devices the NUT package/port installs devd rules in
/usr/local/etc/devd/nut-usb.conf
to set USB device permissions.
devd needs to be restarted for these rules to apply:
# service devd restart
(Re-)connect the device after restarting devd and check that the USB device has the proper permissions. Check the last entries of the system message buffer. You should find an entry like:
# dmesg | tail [...] ugen0.2: <INNO TECH USB to Serial> at usbus0
The device file must be owned by group uucp
and must be group
read-/writable. In the example from above this would be
# ls -Ll /dev/ugen0.2 crw-rw---- 1 root uucp 0xa5 Mar 12 10:33 /dev/ugen0.2
If the permissions are not correct, verify that your device is registered in
/usr/local/etc/devd/nut-usb.conf
. The vendor and product id can be found
using:
# usbconfig -u 0 -a 2 dump_device_desc
where -u
specifies the USB bus number and -a
specifies the USB device
index.
NUT binary package built for Windows platform was last issued for a much older codebase (using NUT v2.6.5 as a baseline). While the current state of the codebase you are looking at aims to refresh the effort of delivering NUT on Windows, the aim at the moment is to help developers build and modernize it after a decade of blissful slumber, and packages are not being regularly produced yet. Functionality of such builds varies a lot depending on build environment used. This effort is generally tracked at https://github.com/orgs/networkupstools/projects/2/views/1 and help would be welcome!
It should currently be possible to build the codebase in native Windows with MSYS2/MinGW and cross-building from Linux with mingw (preferably in a Debian/Ubuntu container). Refer to Prerequisites for building NUT on different OSes and scripts/Windows/README.adoc file for respective build environment preparation instructions.
Note that to use NUT for Windows, non-system dependency DLL files must
be located in same directory as each EXE file that uses them. This can be
accomplished for FOSS libraries (copying them from the build environment)
by calling make install-win-bundle DESTDIR=/some/valid/location
easily.
Archives with binaries built by recent iterations of continuous integration jobs should be available for exploration on the respective CI platforms.
Information below may be currently obsolete, but the NUT project wishes it to become actual and factual again :)
NUT binary package built for Windows platform comes in a .msi
file.
If you are using Windows 95, 98 or Me, you should install Windows Installer 2.0 from Microsoft site.
If you are using Windows 2000 or NT 4.0, you can download it here.
Newer Windows releases should include the Windows Installer natively.
Run NUT-Installer.msi
and follow the wizard indications.
If you plan to use an UPS which is locally connected to an USB port, you have to install libUSB-win32 on your system. Then you must install your device via libusb’s "Inf Wizard".
If you intend to build from source, relevant sources may be available at https://github.com/mcuee/libusb-win32 and keep in mind that it is a variant of libusb-0.1. Current NUT supports libusb-1.0 as well, and that project should have Windows support out of the box (but it was not explored for NUT yet).
If you have selected default directory, all configuration files are located in
C:\Program Files\NUT\ups\etc
For suggestions about setting up the NUT build environment variants for Windows, please see link:docs/config-prereqs.txt and/or link:scripts/Windows/README.adoc files. Note this is rather experimental at this point.
If using USB drivers, such as usbhid-ups
, nutdrv_qx
or blazer_usb
,
you may benefit from the Zadig tool to pin
the low-level drivers needed for LibUSB and further NUT to interact with
the hardware. Otherwise, OS-provided (e.g. "HID Battery") or third-party
drivers may attach and "steal" bytes from the data stream needed by LibUSB
rendering it invalid.
For more details, see NUT issue #1690 and the NUT for Windows article on NUT GitHub Wiki.
You are now ready to configure NUT, and start testing and using it.
You can jump directly to the NUT configuration.
This chapter describes most of the configuration and use aspects of NUT, including establishing communication with the device and configuring safe shutdowns when the UPS battery runs out of power.
There are many programs and features in this package. You should check out the NUT Overview and other accompanying documentation to see how it all works.
NUT does not currently provide proper graphical configuration tools. However, there is now support for Augeas, which will enable the easier creation of configuration tools.
The nutconf(8) tool should also help with programmatic manipulation of various NUT configuration files.
Moreover, nut-scanner(8) is available to discover supported devices (USB, SNMP, Eaton XML/HTTP and IPMI) and NUT servers (using Avahi or the classic connection method).
All configuration files within this package are parsed with a common state machine, which means they all can use a number of extras described here.
First, most of the programs use an upper-case word to declare a configuration directive. This may be something like MONITOR, NOTIFYCMD, or ACCESS. The case does matter here. "monitor" won’t be recognized.
Next, the parser does not care about whitespace between words. If you like to indent things with tabs or spaces, feel free to do it here.
If you need to set a value to something containing spaces, it has to be contained within "quotes" to keep the parser from splitting up the line. That is, you want to use something like this:
SHUTDOWNCMD "/sbin/shutdown -h +0"
Without the quotes, it would only see the first word on the line.
OK, so let’s say you really need to embed that kind of quote within your configuration directive for some reason. You can do that too.
NOTIFYCMD "/bin/notifyme -foo -bar \"hi there\" -baz"
In other words, \
can be used to escape the "
.
Finally, for the situation where you need to put the \
character into your
string, you just escape it.
NOTIFYCMD "/bin/notifyme c:\\dos\\style\\path"
The \
can actually be used to escape any character, but you only really
need it for \
, "
, and #
as they have special meanings to the parser.
When using file names with space characters, you may end up having tricky
things since you need to write them inside ""
which must be escaped:
NOTIFYCMD "\"c:\\path with space\\notifyme\" \"c:\\path with space\\name\""
#
is the comment character. Anything after an unescaped #
is ignored.
Something like this…
identity = my#1ups
will actually turn into identity = my
, since the #
stops the
parsing. If you really need to have a #
in your configuration, then
escape it.
identity = my\#1ups
Much better.
The =
character should be used with care too. There should be only one
"simple" =
character in a line: between the parameter name and its value.
All other =
characters should be either escaped or within "quotes".
password = 123=123
is incorrect. You should use:
password = 123\=123
or:
password = "123=123"
You can put a backslash at the end of the line to join it to the next one. This creates one virtual line that is composed of more than one physical line.
Also, if you leave the ""
quote container open before a newline, it will
keep scanning until it reaches another one. If you see bizarre behavior
in your configuration files, check for an unintentional instance of
quotes spanning multiple lines.
This chapter describes the base configuration to establish communication with the device.
This will be sufficient for PDU. But for UPS and SCD, you will also need to configure automatic shutdowns for low battery events.
On operating systems with service management frameworks (such as Linux
systemd and Solaris/illumos SMF), the life-cycle of driver, data server
and monitoring client daemons is managed respectively by nut-driver
(multi-instance service), nut-server
and nut-monitor
services.
These are in turn wrapped by an "umbrella" service (or systemd "target")
conveniently called nut
which allows to easily start or stop all those
of the bundled services, which are enabled on a particular deployment.
Create one section per UPS in ups.conf(5) file.
The default path for a source installation is /usr/local/ups/etc
,
while packaged installation will vary.
For example, /etc/nut
is used on Debian and derivatives,
while /etc/ups
or /etc/upsd
is used on RedHat and derivatives.
To find out which driver to use, check the
Hardware Compatibility List,
or data/driver.list(.in)
source file.
Once you have picked a driver, create a section for your UPS in ups.conf. You must supply values at least for "driver" and "port".
Some drivers may require other flags or settings. The "desc" value is optional, but is recommended to provide a better description of what useful load your UPS is feeding.
A typical device without any extra settings looks like this:
[mydevice] driver = mydriver port = /dev/ttyS1 desc = "Workstation"
USB drivers (such as usbhid-ups
for non-SHUT mode, nutdrv_qx
for
non-serial mode, bcmxcp_usb
, tripplite_usb
, blazer_usb
, riello_usb
and richcomm_usb
) are special cases and ignore the port value.
You must still set this value, but it does not matter what you set it to; a common and good practice is to set port to auto, but you can put whatever you like.
If you only own one USB UPS, the driver will find it automatically if it matches the identifiers are built into that driver.
If you own more than one, refer to the driver’s manual page for more information on matching a specific device, or trying specific subdriver or protocol options with a currently unknown device.
On Windows systems, the second serial port (COM2
), equivalent to
/dev/ttyS1
on Linux, would be \\\\.\\COM2
.
References: ups.conf(5), nutupsdrv(8), bcmxcp_usb(8), blazer_usb(8), nutdrv_qx(8), richcomm_usb(8), riello_usb(8), tripplite_usb(8), usbhid-ups(8)
Generally, you can just start the driver(s) for your hardware (all sections defined in ups.conf) using the following command:
:; upsdrvctl start
Make sure the driver doesn’t report any errors. It should show a
few details about the hardware and then enter the background. You
should get back to the command prompt a few seconds later. For
reference, a successful start of the usbhid-ups
driver looks like this:
# upsdrvctl start Network UPS Tools - Generic HID driver 0.34 (2.4.1) USB communication driver 0.31 Using subdriver: MGE HID 1.12 Detected EATON - Ellipse MAX 1100 [ADKK22008]
If the driver doesn’t start cleanly, make sure you have picked the right one for your hardware. You might need to try other drivers by changing the "driver=" value in ups.conf.
Be sure to check the driver’s man page to see if it needs any extra settings in ups.conf to detect your hardware.
If it says can't bind /var/state/ups/...
or similar, then your
state path probably isn’t writable by the driver. Check the
permissions and mode on that directory vs. the
user account your driver starts as.
After making changes, try the Ownership and permissions step again.
On operating systems with init-scripts managing life-cycle of the operating
environment, the upsdrvctl
program is also commonly used in those scripts.
It has a few downsides, such as that if the device was not accessible during
OS startup and the driver connection timed out, it would remain not-started
until an administrator (or some other script) "kicks" the driver to retry
startup. Also, startup of the upsd
data server daemon and its clients
like upsmon
is delayed until all the NUT drivers complete their startup
(or time out trying).
This can be a big issue on systems which monitor multiple devices, such as big servers with multiple power sources, or administrative workstations which monitor a datacenter full of UPSes.
For this reason, NUT starting with version 2.8.0 supports startup of its
drivers as independent instances of a nut-driver
service under the Linux
systemd and Solaris/illumos SMF service-management frameworks (corresponding
files and scripts may be not pre-installed in packaging for other systems).
Such service instances have their own and independent life-cycle, including
parallel driver start and stop processing, and retries of startup in case of
failure as implemented by the service framework in the OS. The Linux systemd
solution also includes a nut-driver.target
as a checkpoint that all defined
drivers have indeed started up (as well as being a singular way to enable or
disable startup of drivers).
In both cases, a service named nut-driver-enumerator
is registered, and
when it is (re-)started it scans the currently defined device sections in
ups.conf and the currently defined instances of nut-driver
service,
and brings them in sync (adding or removing service instances), and if
there were changes — it restarts the corresponding drivers (via service
instances) as well as the data server which only reads the list of sections
at its startup. This helper service should be triggered whenever your system
(re-)starts the nut-server
service, so that it runs against an up-to-date
list of NUT driver processes.
Two service bundles are provided for this feature: a set of
nut-driver-enumerator-daemon*
units starts the script as a daemon
to regularly inspect and apply the NUT configuration to OS service unit
wrappings (mainly intended for monitoring systems with a dynamic set of
monitored power devices, or for systems where filesystem events monitoring
is not a clockwork-reliable mechanism to 100% rely on); while the other
nut-driver-enumerator.*
units run the script once per triggering of
the service (usually during boot-up; configuration file changes can be
detected and propagated by systemd most of the time, but not by SMF out
of the box).
A service-oriented solution also allows to consider that different drivers have different dependencies — such as that networked drivers should begin startup after IP addresses have been assigned, while directly-connected devices might need nothing beside a mounted filesystem (or an activated USB stack service or device rule, in case of Linux). Likewise, systems administrators can define further local dependencies between services and their instances as needed on particular deployments.
This solution also adds the upsdrvsvcctl
script to manage NUT drivers as
system service instances, whose CLI mimics that of upsdrvctl
program.
One addition is the resync
argument to trigger nut-driver-enumerator
,
another is a list
argument to display current mappings of service
instances to NUT driver sections. Also, original tool’s arguments such
as the -u
(user to run the driver as) or -D
(debug of the driver)
do not make sense in the service context — the accounts to use and
other arguments to the driver process are part of service setup (and
an administrator can manage it there).
Note that while this solution tries to register service instances with same
names as NUT configuration sections for the devices, this can not always be
possible due to constraints such as syntax supported by a particular service
management framework. In this case, the enumerator falls back to MD5 hashes
of such section names, and the upsdrvsvcctl
script supports this to map
the user-friendly NUT configuration section names to actual service names
that it would manage.
References: man pages: nutupsdrv(8), upsdrvctl(8), upsdrvsvcctl(8)
Configure upsd
, which serves data from the drivers to the clients.
First, edit upsd.conf to allow access to your client systems. By
default, upsd
will only listen to localhost
port 3493/tcp. If you want
to connect to it from other machines, you must specify each interface you
want upsd
to listen on for connections, optionally with a port number.
LISTEN 127.0.0.1 3493 LISTEN ::1 3493
As a special case, LISTEN * <port>
(with an asterisk) will try to
listen on "ANY" IP address for both and IPv6 (::0
) and IPv4 (0.0.0.0
),
subject to upsd
command-line arguments, or system configuration or support.
Note that if the system supports IPv4-mapped IPv6 addressing per RFC-3493,
and does not allow to disable this mode, then there may be one listening
socket to handle both address families.
Refer to the NUT user manual security chapter for information on how to access and secure upsd clients connections.
Next, create upsd.users. For now, this can be an empty file.
You can come back and add more to it later when it’s time to
configure upsmon
or run one of the management tools.
Do not make either file world-readable, since they both hold access control data and passwords. They just need to be readable by the user you created in the preparation process.
The suggested configuration is to chown
it to root
, chgrp
it to the
group you created, then make it readable by the group.
If you installed NUT from source and used make install-as-root
,
or if your distribution packaging did, the sample configuration files
would have the suggested ownership and permissions assigned, so if you
use e.g. cp -pf upsd.users.sample upsd.users
(as root
) to start out
with some annotated comments and adapt that to your deployment, the
copied files should also get the expected safe permissions.
:; chown root:nut upsd.conf upsd.users :; chmod 0640 upsd.conf upsd.users
References: man pages: upsd.conf(5), upsd.users(5), upsd(8)
Start the network data server:
:; upsd
Make sure it is able to connect to the driver(s) on your system. A successful run looks like this:
# upsd Network UPS Tools upsd 2.4.1 listening on 127.0.0.1 port 3493 listening on ::1 port 3493 Connected to UPS [eaton]: usbhid-ups-eaton
upsd
prints dots while it waits for the driver to respond. Your
system may print more or less depending on how many drivers you
have and how fast they are.
If upsd
says that it can’t connect to a UPS or that the data
is stale, then your ups.conf is not configured correctly, or you
have a driver that isn’t working properly. You must fix this before
going on to the next step.
Normally upsd
requires that at least one driver section is
defined in the ups.conf file, and refuses to start otherwise.
If you intentionally do not have any driver sections defined (yet)
but still want the data server to run, respond and report zero devices
(e.g. on an automatically managed monitoring deployment), you can enable
the ALLOW_NO_DEVICE true
option in the upsd.conf file.
Normally upsd
requires that at all LISTEN
directives defined
in the upsd.conf file are honoured (except for mishaps possible with
many names of localhost
), and refuses to start otherwise. If you want
to allow start-up in cases where at least one but possibly not all of
the LISTEN
directives were honoured, you can enable the
ALLOW_NOT_ALL_LISTENERS true
option in the upsd.conf file.
Note you would have to restart upsd
to pick up the LISTEN`ed IP address
if it appears later, so probably configuring `LISTEN *
is a better choice
in such cases.
On operating systems with service management frameworks, the data server
life-cycle is managed by nut-server
service.
Reference: man page: upsd(8)
Make sure that the UPS is providing good status data.
You can use the upsc
command-line client for this:
:; upsc myupsname@localhost ups.status
You should see just one line in response:
OL
OL
means your system is running on line power. If it says something
else (like OB
— on battery, or LB
— low battery), your driver was
probably misconfigured during the Driver configuration
step. If you reconfigure the driver, use upsdrvctl stop
to stop it, then
start it again as shown in the Starting driver(s) step.
Reference: man page: upsc(8)
Look at all of the status data which is being monitored.
:; upsc myupsname@localhost
What happens now depends on the kind of device and driver you have.
In the list, you should see ups.status
with the same value you got
above. A sample run on an UPS (Eaton Ellipse MAX 1100) looks like this:
battery.charge: 100 battery.charge.low: 20 battery.runtime: 2525 battery.type: PbAc device.mfr: EATON device.model: Ellipse MAX 1100 device.serial: ADKK22008 device.type: ups driver.name: usbhid-ups driver.parameter.pollfreq: 30 driver.parameter.pollinterval: 2 driver.parameter.port: auto driver.version: 2.4.1-1988:1990M driver.version.data: MGE HID 1.12 driver.version.internal: 0.34 input.sensitivity: normal input.transfer.boost.low: 185 input.transfer.high: 285 input.transfer.low: 165 input.transfer.trim.high: 265 input.voltage.extended: no outlet.1.desc: PowerShare Outlet 1 outlet.1.id: 2 outlet.1.status: on outlet.1.switchable: no outlet.desc: Main Outlet outlet.id: 1 outlet.switchable: no output.frequency.nominal: 50 output.voltage: 230.0 output.voltage.nominal: 230 ups.beeper.status: enabled ups.delay.shutdown: 20 ups.delay.start: 30 ups.firmware: 5102AH ups.load: 0 ups.mfr: EATON ups.model: Ellipse MAX 1100 ups.power.nominal: 1100 ups.productid: ffff ups.serial: ADKK22008 ups.status: OL CHRG ups.timer.shutdown: -1 ups.timer.start: -1 ups.vendorid: 0463
Reference: man page: upsc(8), NUT command and variable naming scheme
This step is not necessary if you installed from packages.
Edit your startup scripts, and make sure upsdrvctl
and upsd
are run
every time your system starts. In newer versions of NUT, you may have a
nut.conf file which sets the MODE
variable for bundled init-scripts,
to facilitate enabling of certain features in the specific end-user
deployments.
If you installed from source, check the scripts
directory for reference
init-scripts, as well as systemd or SMF service methods and manifests.
The whole point of UPS software is to bring down the OS cleanly when you run out of battery power. Everything else is roughly eye candy.
To make sure your system shuts down properly, you will need to perform some additional configuration and run upsmon. Here are the basics.
When your UPS batteries get low, the operating system needs to be brought down cleanly. Also, the UPS load should be turned off so that all devices that are attached to it are forcibly rebooted, and subsequently start in the predictable order and state suitable for your data center.
Here are the steps that occur when a critical power event happens, for the simpler case of one UPS device feeding one or several systems:
The UPS reaches low battery (a "critical" UPS), that is to say,
upsc
displays:
ups.status: OB LB
The exact behavior depends on the specific device, and is related to such settings and readings as:
battery.charge
and battery.charge.low
battery.runtime
and battery.runtime.low
The upsmon
primary notices the "critical UPS" situation and sets
"FSD" — the "forced shutdown" flag to tell all secondary systems
that it will soon power down the load.
By design, since we require power-cycling the load and don’t want some systems to be powered off while others remain running if the "wall power" returns at the wrong moment as usual, the "FSD" flag can not be removed from the data server unless its daemon is restarted. If we do take the first step in critical mode, then we intend to go all the way — shut down all the servers gracefully, and power down the UPS.
Keep in mind that some UPS devices and corresponding drivers would latch the "FSD" again even if "wall power" is available, but the remaining battery charge is below a threshold configured as "safe" in the device (usually if you manually power on the UPS after a long power outage). This is by design of respective UPS vendors, since in such situation they can not guarantee that if a new power outage happens, their UPS would safely shut down your systems again. So it is deemed better and safer to stay dark until batteries become sufficiently charged.
(If you have no secondary systems, skip to step 6)
upsmon
secondary systems see "FSD" and:
NOTIFY_SHUTDOWN
event
FINALDELAY
seconds — typically 5
SHUTDOWNCMD
upsd
upsmon
primary system waits up to HOSTSYNC
seconds (typically 15
)
for the secondary systems to disconnect from upsd
. If any are still
connected after this time, upsmon
primary stops waiting and proceeds
with the shutdown process.
The upsmon
primary:
NOTIFY_SHUTDOWN
event
FINALDELAY
seconds — typically 5
POWERDOWNFLAG
file in its local filesystem — usually
/etc/killpower
, or /run/nut/killpower
in a temporary file system
SHUTDOWNCMD
init
takes over, kills your processes, syncs and
unmounts some filesystems, and remounts some read-only.
init
then runs your shutdown script. This checks for the
POWERDOWNFLAG
, finds it, and tells the UPS driver(s) to power off
the load by sending commands to the connected UPS device(s) they manage.
Create a upsd
user for upsmon
to use while monitoring this UPS.
Edit upsd.users and create a new section. The upsmon
will connect
to upsd
and use these user name (in brackets) and password to
authenticate (as specified in its configuration via MONITOR
line).
This example is for defining a user called "monuser":
[monuser] password = mypass upsmon primary # or upsmon secondary
References: upsd(8), upsd.users(5)
Reload upsd
. Depending on your configuration, you may be able to
do this without stopping the upsd
daemon process (if it had saved
a PID file earlier):
:; upsd -c reload
If that doesn’t work (check the syslog), just restart it:
:; upsd -c stop :; upsd
For systems with integrated service management (Linux systemd,
illumos/Solaris SMF) their corresponding reload
or refresh
service actions should handle this as well. Note that such integration
generally forgoes saving of PID files, so upsd -c <cmd>
would not work.
If your workflow requires to manage these daemons beside the OS provided
framework, you can customize it to start upsd -FF
and save the PID file.
NUT releases after 2.8.0 define aliases for these units, so if your Linux
distribution uses NUT-provided unit definitions, systemctl reload upsd
may also work.
If you want to make reloading work later, see the entry in the
FAQ about starting upsd
as a different user.
Set the POWERDOWNFLAG
location for upsmon
.
In upsmon.conf, add a POWERDOWNFLAG
directive with a filename.
The upsmon
will create this file when the UPS needs to be powered off
during a power failure when low battery is reached.
We will test for the presence of this file in a later step.
POWERDOWNFLAG /etc/killpower
References: man pages: upsmon(8), upsmon.conf(5)
The recommended setting is to have it owned by root:nut
, then make it
readable by the group and not by the world. This file contains passwords
that could be used by an attacker to start a shutdown, so keep it secure.
If you installed NUT from source and used make install-as-root
,
or if your distribution packaging did, the sample configuration files
would have the suggested ownership and permissions assigned, so if you
use e.g. cp -pf upsmon.conf.sample upsmon.conf
(as root
) to start out
with some annotated comments and adapt that to your deployment, the
copied files should also get the expected safe permissions.
:; chown root:nut upsmon.conf :; chmod 0640 upsmon.conf
This step has been placed early in the process so you secure this file before adding sensitive data in the next step.
Edit upsmon.conf and create a MONITOR
line with the UPS definition
(<upsname>@<hostname>), username and password from the
NUT user creation step, and the
"primary" or "secondary" setting.
If this system is the UPS manager (i.e. it’s connected to this UPS directly
and can manage it using a suitable NUT driver), its upsmon
is the primary:
MONITOR myupsname@mybox 1 monuser mypass primary
If it’s just monitoring this UPS over the network, and some other system is the primary, then this one is a secondary:
MONITOR myupsname@mybox 1 monuser mypass secondary
The number 1
here is the "power value". This should always be set
to 1, unless you have a very special (read: expensive) system with
redundant power supplies. In such cases, refer to the User Manual:
Note that the "power value" may also be 0 for a monitoring (administrative) system which only observes the remote UPS status but is not impacted by its power events, and so does not shut down when the UPS does.
References: upsmon(8), upsmon.conf(5)
Still in upsmon.conf, add a directive that tells upsmon
how to
shut down your system. This example seems to work on most systems:
SHUTDOWNCMD "/sbin/shutdown -h +0"
Notice the presence of "quotes" here to keep it together.
If your system has special needs (e.g. system-provided shutdown handler
is ungracefully time constrained), you may want to set this to a script
which does customized local shutdown tasks before calling init
or
shutdown
programs to handle the system side of this operation.
:; upsmon
If it complains about something, then check your configuration.
On operating systems with service management frameworks, the monitoring client
life-cycle is managed by nut-monitor
service.
Look for messages in the syslog
to indicate success.
It should look something like this:
May 29 01:11:27 mybox upsmon[102]: Startup successful May 29 01:11:28 mybox upsd[100]: Client monuser@192.168.50.1 logged into UPS [myupsname]
Any errors seen here are probably due to an error in the config files of either
upsmon
or upsd
. You should fix them before continuing.
This step is not need if you installed from packages.
Edit your startup scripts, and add a call to upsmon
.
Make sure upsmon
starts when your system comes up.
On systems with upsmon
primary (also running the data server),
do it after upsdrvctl
and upsd
, or it will complain about not
being able to contact the server.
You may delete the POWERDOWNFLAG
in the startup scripts, but it is not
necessary. upsmon
will clear that file for you when it starts.
Init script examples are provide in the scripts directory of the NUT source tree, and in the various packages that exist.
This step is not need if you installed from packages.
Edit your shutdown scripts, and add upsdrvctl shutdown
.
You should configure your system to power down the UPS after the
filesystems are remounted read-only. Have it look for the presence
of the POWERDOWNFLAG
(from upsmon.conf(5)), using this
as an example:
if (/sbin/upsmon -K) then echo "Killing the power, bye!" /sbin/upsdrvctl shutdown sleep 120 # uh oh... the UPS power-off failed # you probably want to reboot here so you don't get stuck! # *** see also the section on power races in the FAQ! *** fi
A more elaborate example can be found in NUT sources, e.g.: https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/blob/master/scripts/systemd/nutshutdown.in
upsdrvctl shutdown
command will probably power off
your machine and others fed by the UPS(es) which it manages.
Don’t use it unless your system is ready to be halted by force.
If you run RAID, read the RAID warning below!
upsdrvctl
, upsmon
,
the POWERDOWNFLAG
file, ups.conf and your UPS driver(s) are
mounted (possibly in read-only mode) when the system gets to
this point. Otherwise it won’t be able to figure out what to do.
upsmon
program is executable
at this point, your script can (test -f /etc/killpower)
in a somewhat
non-portable manner, instead of asking upsmon -K
for the verdict
according to its current configuration.
UPS equipment varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and even within model lines. You should test the shutdown sequence on your systems before leaving them unattended. A successful sequence is one where the OS halts before the battery runs out, and the system restarts when power returns.
The first step is to see how upsdrvctl
will behave without actually
turning off the power. To do so, use the -t
argument:
:; upsdrvctl -t shutdown
It will display the sequence without actually calling the drivers.
You can finally test a forced shutdown sequence (FSD) using:
:; upsmon -c fsd
This will execute a full shutdown sequence, as presented in Shutdown design, starting from the 3rd step.
If everything works correctly, the computer will be forcibly powered off, may remain off for a few seconds to a few minutes (depending on the driver and UPS type), then will power on again.
If your UPS just sits there and never resets the load, you are vulnerable to a power race and should add the "reboot after timeout" hack at the very least.
Also refer to the section on power races in the FAQ.
Support for suspend to RAM and suspend to disk has been available in the Linux kernel for a while now. For obvious reasons, suspending to RAM isn’t particularly useful when the UPS battery is getting low, but suspend to disk may be an interesting concept.
This approach minimizes the amount of disruption which would be caused by an extended outage. The UPS goes on battery, then reaches low battery, and the system takes a snapshot of itself and halts. Then it is turned off and waits for the power to return.
Once the power is back, the system reboots, pulls the snapshot back in, and keeps going from there. If the user happened to be away when it happened, they may return and have no idea that their system actually shut down completely in the middle (although network connections will drop).
In order for this to work, you need to shutdown NUT (UPS driver, upsd
server and upsmon
client) in the suspend
script and start them again in
the resume
script. Don’t try to keep them running. The upsd
server
will latch the FSD state (so it won’t be usable after resuming) and so
will the upsmon
client. Some drivers may work after resuming, but many
don’t and some UPS devices will require re-initialization, so it’s best not
to keep them running either.
Starting with NUT v2.8.3, there is some growing support for system-wide sleep on some platforms (e.g. to catch the "going to sleep" event and make a note of it in the daemons, to take the least-surprise corrective actions after a significant change in system clock readings), but the warnings in previous paragraph may still apply.
After stopping NUT driver, server and client you’ll have to send the UPS
the command to shutdown only if the POWERDOWNFLAG
is present. Note
that most likely you’ll have to allow for a grace period after calling
upsdrvctl shutdown
since the system will still have to take a
snapshot of itself after that. Not all drivers and devices support this,
so before going down this road, make sure that the one you’re using does.
load.off.delay
,
ups.delay.shutdown
, offdelay
and/or shutdown_delay
If you run any sort of RAID equipment, make sure your arrays are either halted (if possible) or switched to "read-only" mode. Otherwise you may suffer a long resync once the system comes back up.
The kernel may not ever run its final shutdown procedure, so you must take
care of all array shutdowns in userspace before upsdrvctl shutdown
runs.
If you use software RAID (md) on Linux, get mdadm
and try using
mdadm --readonly
to put your arrays in a safe state. This has to
happen after your shutdown scripts have remounted the filesystems.
On hardware RAID or other kernels, you have to do some detective work. It may be necessary to contact the vendor or the author of your driver to find out how to put the array in a state where a power loss won’t leave it "dirty".
Our understanding is that most if not all RAID devices on Linux will be fine unless there are pending writes. Make sure your filesystems are remounted read-only and you should be covered.
The split nature of this UPS monitoring software allows a wide variety of power connections. This chapter will help you identify how things should be configured using some general descriptions.
There are two main elements:
You can play "mix and match" with those two to arrive at these descriptions for individual hosts:
A small to medium sized data room usually has one C and a bunch of Bs. This means that there’s a system (type C) hooked to the UPS which depends on it for power. There are also some other systems in there (type B) which depend on that same UPS for power, but aren’t directly connected to it communications-wise.
Larger data rooms or those with multiple UPSes may have several "clusters" of the "single C, many Bs" depending on how it’s all wired.
Finally, there’s a special case. Type A systems are connected to an UPS’s communication port, but don’t depend on it for power. This usually happens when an UPS is physically close to a box and can reach the serial port, but the power wiring is such that it doesn’t actually feed that box.
Once you identify a system’s type, use this list to decide which of the programs need to be run for monitoring:
upsd
upsmon
(in secondary mode)
upsd
, and upsmon
(in primary mode, as the UPS manager)
To further complicate things, you can have a system that is hooked to
multiple UPSes, but only depends on one for power. This particular
situation makes it an A
relative to one UPS, and a C
relative to the
other. The software can handle this — you just have to tell it what to do.
NUT can also serve as a data proxy to increase the number of clients,
or share the communication load between several upsd
instances.
If you are running large server-class systems that have more than one power feed, see the next section for information on how to handle it properly.
By using multiple MONITOR
statements in upsmon.conf, you can configure
an environment where a large machine with redundant power monitors multiple
separate UPSes.
For the examples in this section, we will use a server with four power
supplies installed and locally running the full NUT stack, including
upsmon
in primary mode — as the UPS manager.
Two UPSes, Alpha and Beta, are each driving two of the power supplies (by adding up, we know about the four power supplies of the current system). This means that either Alpha or Beta can totally shut down and the server will be able to keep running.
The upsmon.conf configuration which reflects this is the following:
MONITOR ups-alpha@myhost 2 monuser mypass primary MONITOR ups-beta@myhost 2 monuser mypass primary MINSUPPLIES 2
With such configuration, upsmon
on this system will only shut down when
both UPS devices reach a critical (on battery + low battery) condition,
since Alpha and Beta each provide the same power value.
As an added bonus, this means you can move a running server from one UPS to another (for maintenance purpose for example) without bringing it down since the minimum sufficient power will be provided at all times.
The MINSUPPLIES
line tells upsmon
that we need at least 2 power supplies
to be receiving power from a good UPS (on line or on battery, just not
on battery and low battery).
We could have used a Power Value of 1
for both UPS, and have
MINSUPPLIES
set to 1
too. These values are purely arbitrary, so
you are free to use your own rules. Here, we have linked these values
to the number of power supplies that each UPS is feeding (2) since this
maps better to physical topology and allows to throw a third or fourth
UPS into the mix without much configuration headache.
If you have multiple UPSes connected to your system, chances are that you
need to shut them down in a specific order. The goal is to shut down
everything but the one keeping upsmon
alive at first, then you do that
one last.
To set the order in which your UPSes receive the shutdown commands, define
the sdorder
value in your ups.conf device sections.
[bigone] driver = usbhid-ups port = auto sdorder = 2
[littleguy] driver = mge-shut port = /dev/ttyS0 sdorder = 1
[misc] driver = blazer_ser port = /dev/ttyS1 sdorder = 0
The order runs from 0 to the highest number available. So, for this configuration, the order of shutdowns would be misc, littleguy, and then bigone.
If you have a UPS that shouldn’t be powered off when running
upsdrvctl shutdown
, set its sdorder
to -1
.
There are a lot of ways to handle redundancy and they all come down to how many power supplies, power cords and independent UPS connections you have. A system with a 1:1 cord:supply ratio has more wires stuffed behind it, but it’s much easier to move things around since any given UPS drives a smaller percentage of the overall power.
More information can be found in the NUT user manual, and the various user manual pages.
upsmon can call out to a helper script or program when the device changes state. The example upsmon.conf has a full list of which state changes are available — ONLINE, ONBATT, LOWBATT, and more.
There are two options, that will be presented in details:
Your command will be called with the full text of the message as one argument.
For the default values, refer to the sample upsmon.conf file.
The environment string NOTIFYTYPE will contain the type string of whatever caused this event to happen — ONLINE, ONBATT, LOWBATT, …
Making this some sort of shell script might be a good idea, but the helper can be in any programming or scripting language.
Remember that your helper must be executable. If you are using a script, make sure the execution flags are set.
For more information, refer to upsmon(8) and upsmon.conf(5) manual pages.
Set EXEC flags on various things in upsmon.conf(5):
NOTIFYFLAG ONBATT EXEC NOTIFYFLAG ONLINE EXEC
If you want other things like WALL or SYSLOG to happen, just add them:
NOTIFYFLAG ONBATT EXEC+WALL+SYSLOG
You get the idea.
Tell upsmon where your script is
NOTIFYCMD /path/to/my/script
Make a simple script like this at that location:
#! /bin/bash echo "$*" | sendmail -F"ups@mybox" bofh@pager.example.com
That approach is bare-bones, but you should get the text content of the alert in the body of the message, since upsmon passes the alert text (from NOTIFYMSG) as an argument.
Your helper script will be run with a few environment variables set.
UPSNAME: the name of the system that generated the change.
This will be one of your identifiers from the MONITOR lines in upsmon.conf.
You can use these to do different things based on which system has changed state. You could have it only send pages for an important system while totally ignoring a known trouble spot, for example.
upsmon will call your script every time an event happens that has the EXEC flag set. This means a quick power failure that lasts mere seconds might generate a notification storm. To suppress this sort of annoyance, use upssched as your NOTIFYCMD program, and configure it to call your command after a timer has elapsed.
upssched is a helper for upsmon that will invoke commands for you at some interval relative to a UPS event. It can be used to send pages, mail out notices about things, or even shut down the box early.
There will be examples scattered throughout. Change them to suit your pathnames, UPS locations, and so forth.
When an event occurs, upsmon will call whatever you specify as a NOTIFYCMD in your upsmon.conf, if you also enable the EXEC in your NOTIFYFLAGS. In this case, we want upsmon to call upssched as the notifier, since it will be doing all the work for us. So, in the upsmon.conf:
NOTIFYCMD /usr/local/ups/sbin/upssched
Then we want upsmon to actually use it for the notify events, so again in the upsmon.conf we set the flags:
NOTIFYFLAG ONLINE SYSLOG+EXEC NOTIFYFLAG ONBATT SYSLOG+WALL+EXEC NOTIFYFLAG LOWBATT SYSLOG+WALL+EXEC ... and so on.
For the purposes of this document I will only use those three, but you can set the flags for any of the valid notify types.
Once upsmon has been configured with the NOTIFYCMD and EXEC flags, you’re ready to deal with the upssched.conf details. In this file, you specify just what will happen when a given event occurs on a particular UPS.
First you need to define the name of the script or program that will handle timers that trigger. This is your CMDSCRIPT, and needs to be above any AT defines. There’s an example provided with the program, so we’ll use that here:
CMDSCRIPT /usr/local/ups/bin/upssched-cmd
Then you have to define the variables PIPEFN and LOCKFN; the former sets the file name of the FIFO that will pass communications between processes to start and stop timers, while the latter sets the file name for a temporary file created by upssched in order to avoid a race condition under some circumstances. Please see the relevant comments in upssched.conf for additional information and advice about these variables.
Now you can tell your CMDSCRIPT what to do when it is called by upsmon.
The design in a nutshell is:
upsmon ---> calls upssched ---> calls your CMDSCRIPT
Ultimately, the CMDSCRIPT does the actual useful work, whether that’s initiating an early shutdown with upsmon -c fsd, sending a page by calling sendmail, or opening a subspace channel to V’ger.
Let’s say that you want to receive a notification when any UPS has been running on battery for 30 seconds. Create a handler that starts a 30 second timer for an ONBATT condition.
AT ONBATT * START-TIMER onbattwarn 30
This means "when any UPS (the *) goes on battery, start a timer called onbattwarn that will trigger in 30 seconds". We’ll come back to the onbattwarn part in a moment. Right now we need to make sure that we don’t trigger that timer if the UPS happens to come back before the time is up. In essence, if it goes back on line, we need to cancel it. So, let’s tell upssched that.
AT ONLINE * CANCEL-TIMER onbattwarn
Timers are pure in-memory mechanisms, specific to upssched. Conversely to other mechanisms found in NUT, such as upsmon→POWERDOWNFLAG, there is no file created on the filesystem.
As an example, consider the scenario where a UPS goes onto battery power. However, the users are not informed until 30 seconds later — using a timer as described above. Whilst this may let the logged in users know that the UPS is on battery power, it does not inform any users subsequently logging in. To enable this we could, at the same time, create a file which is read and displayed to any user trying to login whilst the UPS is on battery power. If the UPS comes back onto utility power within 30 seconds, then we can cancel the timer and remove the file, as described above. However, if the UPS comes back onto utility power say 5 minutes later then we do not want to use any timers but we still want to remove the file. To do this we could use:
AT ONLINE * EXECUTE ups-back-on-power
This means that when upsmon detects that the UPS is back on utility power it will signal upssched. Upssched will see the above command and simply pass ups-back-on-power as an argument directly to CMDSCRIPT. This occurs immediately, there are no timers involved.
OK, now that upssched knows how the timers are supposed to work, let’s give it something to do when one actually triggers. The name of the example timer is onbattwarn, so that’s the argument that will be passed into your CMDSCRIPT when it triggers. This means we need to do some shell script writing to deal with that input.
#! /bin/sh case $1 in onbattwarn) # Send a notification mail echo "The UPS has been on battery for awhile" \ | mail -s"UPS monitor" bofh@pager.example.com # Create a flag-file on the filesystem, for your own processing /usr/bin/touch /some/path/ups-on-battery ;; ups-back-on-power) # Delete the flag-file on the filesystem /bin/rm -f /some/path/ups-on-battery ;; *) logger -t upssched-cmd "Unrecognized command: $1" ;; esac
This is a very simple script example, but it shows how you can test for the presence of a given trigger. With multiple ATs creating various timer names, you will need to test for each possibility and handle it according to your desires.
You can invoke just about anything from inside the CMDSCRIPT. It doesn’t need to be a shell script, either — that’s just an example. If you want to write a program that will parse argv[1] and deal with the possibilities, that will work too.
One thing that gets requested a lot is early shutdowns in upsmon. With upssched, you can now have this functionality. Just set a timer for some length of time at ONBATT which will invoke a shutdown command if it elapses. Just be sure to cancel this timer if you go back ONLINE before then.
The best way to do this is to use the upsmon callback feature. You can make upsmon set the "forced shutdown" (FSD) flag on the upsd so your secondary systems shut down early too. Just do something like this in your CMDSCRIPT:
/sbin/upsmon -c fsd
the path to upsmon
must be provided. The default for an installation
built from sources is /usr/local/ups
(so /usr/local/ups/sbin/upsmon
),
while packaged installations will generally comply to
FHS — Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
(so /sbin/upsmon
).
It’s not a good idea to call your system’s shutdown routine directly from the CMDSCRIPT, since there’s no synchronization with the secondary systems hooked to the same UPS. FSD is the primary’s way of saying "we’re shutting down now like it or not, so you’d better get ready".
This program was written primarily to fulfill the requests of users for the early shutdown scenario. The "outboard" design of the program (relative to upsmon) was intended to reduce the load on the average system. Most people don’t have the requirement of shutting down after n seconds on battery, since the usual OB+LB testing is sufficient.
This program was created separately so those people don’t have to spend CPU time and RAM on something that will never be used in their environments.
The design of the timer handler is also geared towards minimizing impact. It will come and go from the process list as necessary. When a new timer is started, a process will be forked to actually watch the clock and eventually start the CMDSCRIPT. When a timer triggers, it is removed from the queue. Canceling a timer will also remove it from the queue. When no timers are present in the queue, the background process exits.
This means that you will only see upssched running when one of two things is happening:
The final optimization handles the possibility of trying to cancel a timer when there’s none running. If there’s no process already running, there are no timers to cancel, and furthermore there is no need to start a clock-watcher. As a result, it skips that step and exits sooner.
NUT supports advanced outlets management for any kind of device that proposes it. This chapter introduces how to manage outlets in general, and how to take advantage of the provided features.
Outlets are the core of Power Distribution Units. They allow you to turn on, turn off or cycle the load on each outlet.
Some UPS models also provide manageable outlets (Eaton, MGE, Powerware, Tripplite, …) that help save power in various ways, and manage loads more intelligently.
Finally, some devices can be managed in a PDU-like way. Consider blade systems: the blade chassis can be controlled remotely to turn on, turn off or cycle the power on individual blade servers.
NUT allows you to control all these devices!
NUT provides a complete and uniform integration of outlets related data, through the outlet collection.
First, there is a special outlet, called main outlet. You can access it through outlet.{id, desc, …} without any index.
Any modification through the main outlet will affect all outlets. For example, calling the command outlet.load.cycle will cycle all outlets.
Next, outlets index starts from 1. Index 0 is implicitly reserved to the main outlet. So the first outlet is outlet.1.*.
For a complete list of outlet data and commands, refer to the NUT command and variable naming scheme.
An example upsc output (data/epdu-managed.dev) is available in the source archive.
The variables supported depend on the exact device type.
Smart Power Distribution Units provide at least various meters, related to current, power and voltage.
Some more advanced devices also provide control through the load.off, load.on and load.cycle commands.
Some advanced Uninterruptible Power Supplies provide smart outlet management.
This allows to program a limited backup time to non-critical loads in order to keep the maximum of the battery reserve for critical equipment.
This also allows the same remote electrical management of devices provided by PDUs, which can be very interesting in Data Centers.
For example, on small setup, you can plug printers, USB devices, hubs, (…) into managed outlets. Depending on your UPS’s capabilities, you will be able to turn off those loads:
This will ensure a maximum runtime for the computer.
On bigger systems, with bigger UPSs, this is the same thing with servers instead of small devices.
If you need the scheduling function and your device doesn’t support it, you can still use NUT scheduling features.
don’t plug the UPS’s communication cable (USB or network) on a managed outlet. Otherwise, all computers will be stopped as soon as the communication is lost.
As mentioned in the introduction, some other devices can be considered and managed like PDUs. This is the case in most blade systems, where the blade chassis offers power management services.
This way, you can control remotely each blade server as if it were a PDU outlet.
This category of devices is generally called Remote Power Controls — or "RPC" in NUT.
NUT supports daisychained devices for any kind of device that proposes it. This chapter introduces:
It’s not unusual to see some daisy-chained PDUs or UPSs, connected together in master-slave mode, to only consume 1 IP address for their communication interface (generally, network card exposing SNMP data) and expose only one point of communication to manage several devices, through the daisy-chain master.
This breaks the historical consideration of NUT that one driver provides data for one unique device. However, there is an actual need, and a smart approach was considered to fulfill this, while not breaking the standard scope (for base compatibility).
The daisychain support uses the device collection to extend the historical NUT scope (1 driver — 1 device), and provides data from the additional devices accessible through a single management interface.
A new variable was introduced to provide the number of devices exposed: the
device.count
, which:
device.X.{...}
To ensure backward compatibility in NUT, the data of the various devices are exposed the following way:
device.0
is a special case, for the whole set of devices (the whole
daisychain). It is equivalent to device
(without .X
index) and root
collections. The idea is to be able to get visibility and control over the
whole daisychain from a single point.
device.1
(master) to device.N
(slaves).
That way, client applications that are unaware of the daisychain support, will only see the whole daisychain, as it would normally seem, and not nothing at all.
Moreover, this solution is generic, and not specific to the ePDU use case currently considered. It thus support both the current NUT scope, along with other use cases (parallel / serial UPS setups), and potential evolution and technology change (hybrid chain with UPS and PDU for example).
Devices (master and slaves) alarms are published in device.X.ups.alarm
,
which may evolve into device.X.alarm
. If any of the devices has an alarm,
the main ups.status
will publish an ALARM
flag. This flag is be cleared
once all devices have no alarms anymore.
ups.alarm
behavior is not yet defined (all devices alarms vs. list of
device(s) that have alarms vs. nothing?)
Here is an example excerpt of three PDUs, connected in daisychain mode, with one master and two slaves:
device.count: 3 device.mfr: EATON device.model: EATON daisychain PDU device.1.mfr: EATON device.1.model: EPDU MI 38U-A IN: L6-30P 24A 1P OUT: 36XC13:6XC19 device.2.mfr: EATON device.2.model: EPDU MI 38U-A IN: L6-30P 24A 1P OUT: 36XC13:6XC19 device.3.mfr: EATON device.3.model: EPDU MI 38U-A IN: L6-30P 24A 1P OUT: 36XC13:6XC19 ... device.3.ups.alarm: high current critical! device.3.ups.status: ALARM ... input.voltage: ??? (proposal: range or list or average?) device.1.input.voltage: 237.75 device.2.input.voltage: 237.75 device.3.input.voltage: 237.75 ... outlet.1.status: ?? (proposal: "on, off, off) device.1.outlet.1.status: on device.2.outlet.1.status: off device.3.outlet.1.status: off ... ups.status: ALARM
These details are dedicated to the snmp-ups
driver!
In order to enable daisychain support for a range of devices, developers have to do two things:
device.count
entry in a mapping file (see *-mib.c
)
Optionally, if there is support for outlets and / or outlet-groups, there is already a template formatting string. So you have to tag such templates with multiple definitions, to point if the daisychain index is the first or second formatting string.
In order to enable daisychain support on a mapping structure, the following steps have to be done:
Add a "device.count" entry in the mapping file: snmp-ups will determine if the daisychain support has to be enabled (if more than 1 device). To achieve this, use one of the following type of declarations:
a) point at an OID which provides the number of devices:
{ "device.count", 0, 1, ".1.3.6.1.4.1.13742.6.3.1.0", "1", SU_FLAG_STATIC, NULL },
b) point at a template OID to guesstimate the number of devices, by walking through this template, until it fails:
{ "device.count", 0, 1, ".1.3.6.1.4.1.534.6.6.7.1.2.1.2.%i", "1", SU_FLAG_STATIC, NULL, NULL },
Modify all entries so that OIDs include the formatting string for the daisychain index. For example, if you have the following entry:
{ "device.model", ST_FLAG_STRING, SU_INFOSIZE, ".1.3.6.1.4.1.534.6.6.7.1.2.1.2.0", ... },
And if the last "0" of the the 4th field represents the index of the device in the daisychain, then you would have to adapt it the following way:
{ "device.model", ST_FLAG_STRING, SU_INFOSIZE, ".1.3.6.1.4.1.534.6.6.7.1.2.1.2.%i", ... },
If there already exist templates in the mapping structure, such as for single outlets and outlet-groups, you also need to specify the position of the daisychain device index in the OID strings for all entries in the mapping table, to indicate where the daisychain insertion point is exactly.
For example, using the following entry:
{ "outlet.%i.current", 0, 0.001, ".1.3.6.1.4.1.534.6.6.7.6.4.1.3.0.%i", NULL, SU_OUTLET, NULL, NULL },
You would have to translate it to:
{ "outlet.%i.current", 0, 0.001, ".1.3.6.1.4.1.534.6.6.7.6.4.1.3.%i.%i", NULL, SU_OUTLET | SU_TYPE_DAISY_1, NULL, NULL },
SU_TYPE_DAISY_1
flag indicates that the daisychain index is the first
%i
specifier in the OID template string. If it is the second one, use
SU_TYPE_DAISY_2
.
Two functions are available to handle alarms on daisychain devices in your driver:
device_alarm_init()
: clear the current alarm buffer
device_alarm_commit(const int device_number)
: commit the current alarm
buffer to device.<device_number>.ups.alarm
, and increase the count of
alarms. If the current alarms buffer is empty, the count of alarm is
decreased, and the variable device.<device_number>.ups.alarm
is removed
from publication. Once the alarm count reaches "0", the main (device.0
)
ups.status
will also remove the "ALARM" flag.
When implementing a new driver, the following functions have to be called:
alarm_init()
at the beginning of the main update loop, for the whole
daisychain. This will set the alarm count to "0", and reinitialize all
alarms,
device_alarm_init()
at the beginning of the per-device update loop.
This will only clear the alarms for the current device,
device_alarm_commit()
at the end of the per-device update loop.
This will flush the current alarms for the current device,
device_alarm_init()
at the end of the per-device update loop.
This will clear the current alarms, and ensure that this buffer will not
be considered by other subsequent devices,
alarm_commit()
at the end of the main update loop, for the whole
daisychain. This will take care of publishing or not the "ALARM" flag
in the main ups.status (device.0
, root collection).
The NUT Team is very interested in providing the highest security level to its users.
Many internal and external mechanisms exist to secure NUT. And several steps are needed to ensure that your NUT setup meets your security requirements.
This chapter will present you these mechanisms, by increasing order of security level. This means that the more security you need, the more mechanisms you will have to apply.
You may want to have a look at NUT Quality Assurance, since some topics are related to NUT security and reliability.
In order to verify the NUT source code signature for releases, perform the following steps:
Retrieve the NUT maintainer’s signature keyring:
$ gpg --fetch-keys https://www.networkupstools.org/source/nut-key.gpg
As of NUT 2.8.0, a new release key is used, but the nut-key.gpg
should
be cumulative with older chain key files (includes them). You can view the key
list in a downloaded copy of the URL above with:
$ gpg --with-colons --import-options import-show --dry-run --import < nut-key.gpg
…and as of this writing, it should contain two key sets for various identities of "Arnaud Quette" and one set of "Jim Klimov".
Just in case, the previous key file used since NUT 2.7.3 release is stored as NUT old maintainer’s signature for 2.7.3-2.7.4 releases
In order to verify an even older release, please use NUT old maintainer’s signature since 2002 until 2.7.3 release
Launch the GPG checking using the following command:
$ gpg --verify nut-X.Y.Z.tar.gz.sig
You should see a message mentioning a "Good signature", with formatting which depends on your gpg version, like:
gpg: Signature made Thu Jun 1 00:10:16 2023 CEST ... gpg: Good signature from "Jim Klimov ..." ... Primary key fingerprint: B834 59F7 76B9 0224 988F 36C0 DE01 84DA 7043 DCF7 ...
The previously used maintainer’s signatures would output (with markup of older gpg tools here):
gpg: Signature made Wed Apr 15 15:55:30 2015 CEST using RSA key ID 55CA5976 gpg: Good signature from "Arnaud Quette ..." ...
or:
gpg: Signature made Thu Jul 5 16:15:05 2007 CEST using DSA key ID 204DDF1B gpg: Good signature from "Arnaud Quette ..." ...
As a weaker but simpler alternative to verifying a signature, you can verify just the accompanying checksums of the source archive file. This is useful primarily to check against bit-rot in original storage or in transit. As far as disclaimers go: ideally, you should cover all provided algorithms — e.g. MD5 and SHA256 — to minimize the chance that intentional malicious tampering on the wire goes undetected. A myriad tools can check that on various platforms; some examples follow:
# Example original checksum to compare with, from NUT website: $ cat nut-2.8.0.tar.gz.sha256 c3e5a708da797b7c70b653d37b1206a000fcb503b85519fe4cdf6353f792bfe5 nut-2.8.0.tar.gz
# Generate checksum of downloaded archive with perl (a NUT build dependency # generally, though you may have to install Digest::SHA module from CPAN): $ perl -MDigest::SHA=sha256_hex -le "print sha256_hex <>" nut-2.8.0.tar.gz c3e5a708da797b7c70b653d37b1206a000fcb503b85519fe4cdf6353f792bfe5
# Generate checksum of downloaded archive with openssl (another optional # NUT build dependency): $ openssl sha256 nut-2.8.0.tar.gz SHA256(nut-2.8.0.tar.gz)= c3e5a708da797b7c70b653d37b1206a000fcb503b85519fe4cdf6353f792bfe5
# Generate checksum of downloaded archive with coreutils: $ sha256sum nut-2.8.0.tar.gz c3e5a708da797b7c70b653d37b1206a000fcb503b85519fe4cdf6353f792bfe5 nut-2.8.0.tar.gz
# Auto-check downloaded checksum against downloaded archive with coreutils: $ sha256sum -c nut-2.8.0.tar.gz.sha256 nut-2.8.0.tar.gz: OK
# Generate checksum of downloaded archive with GPG: $ gpg --print-md SHA256 nut-2.8.0.tar.gz nut-2.8.0.tar.gz: C3E5A708 DA797B7C 70B653D3 7B1206A0 00FCB503 B85519FE 4CDF6353 F792BFE5
All configuration files should be protected so that the world can’t read them. Use the following commands to accomplish this:
chown root:nut /etc/nut/* chmod 640 /etc/nut/*
Finally, the state path directory, which holds the
communication between the driver(s) and upsd
, should also be secured.
chown root:nut /var/state/ups chmod 0770 /var/state/ups
Administrative commands such as setting variables and the instant commands are powerful, and access to them needs to be restricted.
NUT provides an internal mechanism to do so, through upsd.users(5).
This file defines who may access instant commands and settings, and what is available.
During the initial
NUT user creation, we have created a
monitoring user for upsmon
.
You can also create an administrator
user in NUT with full power using:
[administrator] password = mypass actions = set instcmds = all
For more information on how to restrict actions and instant commands, refer to upsd.users(5) manual page.
NUT administrative user definitions should be used in conjunction with TCP Wrappers.
If you are not using NUT on a standalone setup, you will need to enforce
network access to upsd
.
There are various ways to do so.
LISTEN interface port
Bind a listening port to the interface specified by its Internet address. This may be useful on hosts with multiple interfaces. You should not rely exclusively on this for security, as it can be subverted on many systems.
Listen on TCP port port
instead of the default value which was compiled into
the code. This overrides any value you may have set with configure
--with-port
. If you don’t change it with configure or this value, upsd
will
listen on port 3493 for this interface.
Multiple LISTEN addresses may be specified. The default is to bind to
127.0.0.1
if no LISTEN addresses are specified (and ::1
if IPv6 support is
compiled in).
LISTEN 127.0.0.1 LISTEN 192.168.50.1 LISTEN ::1 LISTEN 2001:0db8:1234:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7344
As a special case, LISTEN * <port>
(with an asterisk) will try to
listen on "ANY" IP address for both IPv6 (::0
) and IPv4 (0.0.0.0
),
subject to upsd
command-line arguments, or system configuration or support.
Note that if the system supports IPv4-mapped IPv6 addressing per RFC-3493,
and does not allow to disable this mode, then there may be one listening
socket to handle both address families.
This parameter will only be read at startup. You’ll need to restart (rather
than reload) upsd
to apply any changes made here.
NUT has its own official IANA port: 3493/tcp.
The upsmon
process on secondary systems, as well as any other NUT client
(such as upsc
, upscmd
, upsrw
, NUT-Monitor, …) connects to the upsd
process on the system which manages the UPS, via this TCP port. Usually an
upsmon
process runs on the latter system in "primary" mode for the devices
connected to it.
The upsd
process does not initiate outgoing connections.
Certain NUT drivers (for network-managed devices) can initiate their own connections to various ports according to corresponding vendor protocol.
You should use this to restrict network access.
NUT can tightly integrate with Uncomplicated Firewall using the provided profile (nut.ufw.profile).
You must first install the profile on your system:
$ cp nut.ufw.profile /etc/ufw/applications.d/
To enable outside access to your local upsd, use:
$ ufw allow NUT
To restrict access to the network 192.168.X.Y, use:
$ ufw allow from 192.168.0.0/16 to any app NUT
You can also use graphical frontends, such as gui-ufw (gufw), ufw-kde or ufw-frontends.
For more information, refer to:
If the server is build with tcp-wrappers support enabled, it will check if the
NUT username is allowed to connect from the client address through the
/etc/hosts.allow
and /etc/hosts.deny
files.
This will only be done for commands that require the user to be logged into the server.
hosts.allow
:
upsd : admin@127.0.0.1/32 upsd : observer@127.0.0.1/32 observer@192.168.1.0/24
hosts.deny
:
upsd : ALL
Further details are described in hosts_access(5).
SSL is available as a build option (--with-ssl
).
It encrypts sessions between upsd
and clients, and can also be used to
authenticate servers.
This means that stealing port 3493 from upsd
will no longer net you interesting
passwords.
Several things must happen before this will work, however. This chapter will present these steps.
SSL is available via two back-end libraries : NSS and OpenSSL (historically).
You can choose to use one of them by specifying it with a build option
(--with-nss
or --with-openssl
). If neither is specified, the configure
script will try to detect one of them, with a precedence for OpenSSL.
This section describes how to enable NUT SSL support using OpenSSL.
Install OpenSSL as usual, either from source or binary packages. If using binary packages, be sure to include the developer libraries.
Recompile NUT from source, starting with configure --with-openssl
.
Then install everything as usual.
openssl (the program) should be in your PATH, unless you installed it from
source yourself, in which case it may be in /usr/local/ssl/bin
.
Use the following command to create the certificate:
openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -out upsd.crt -keyout upsd.key
You can also put a -days nnn
in there to set the expiration. If
you skip this, it may default to 30 days. This is probably not what
you want.
It will ask several questions. What you put in there doesn’t matter a whole lot, since nobody is going to see it for now. Future versions of the clients may present data from it, so you might use this opportunity to identify each server somehow.
Use the following command to determine the hash of the certificate:
openssl x509 -hash -noout -in upsd.crt
You’ll get back a single line with 8 hex characters. This is the hash of the certificate, which is used for naming the client-side certificate. For the purposes of this example the hash is 0123abcd.
Use the following commands to install the client-side certificate:
mkdir <certpath> chmod 0755 <certpath> cp upsd.crt <certpath>/<hash>.0
Example:
mkdir /usr/local/ups/etc/certs chmod 0755 /usr/local/ups/etc/certs cp upsd.crt /usr/local/ups/etc/certs/0123abcd.0
If you already have a file with that name in there, increment the
0
part until you get a unique filename that works.
If you have multiple client systems (like upsmon
instances in
secondary mode), be sure to install this file on them as well.
We recommend making a directory under your existing confpath to
keep everything in the same place. Remember the path you created,
since you will need to put it in upsmon.conf
later.
It must not be writable by unprivileged users, since someone could
insert a new client certificate and fool upsmon
into trusting a
fake upsd
.
To do so, use the below commands:
cat upsd.crt upsd.key > upsd.pem chown root:nut upsd.pem chmod 0640 upsd.pem
This file must be kept secure, since anyone possessing it could
pretend to be upsd
and harvest authentication data if they get a
hold of port 3493.
Having it owned by root
and readable by group nut
allows upsd
to read the file without being able to change the contents. This
is done to minimize the impact if someone should break into upsd
.
NUT reads the key and certificate files after dropping privileges
and forking.
There are probably other ways to handle this, involving keys which have been signed by a CA you recognize. Contact your local SSL guru.
Install the certificate with the following command:
mv upsd.pem <upsd certfile path>
Example:
mv upsd.pem /usr/local/ups/etc/upsd.pem
After that, edit your upsd.conf
and tell it where to find it:
CERTFILE /usr/local/ups/etc/upsd.pem
It should come back up without any complaints. If it says something about keys or certificates, then you probably missed a step.
If you run upsd
as a separate user id (like nutsrv
), make sure that
user can read the upsd.pem
file.
Edit your upsmon.conf
, and tell it where the CERTPATH
is:
CERTPATH <path>
Example:
CERTPATH /usr/local/ups/etc/certs
Put this in upsmon.conf
:
CERTVERIFY 1
Without this, there is no guarantee that the upsd
is the right host.
Enabling this greatly reduces the risk of man in the middle attacks.
This effectively forces the use of SSL, so don’t use this unless
all of your upsd
hosts are ready for SSL and have their certificates
in order.
Again in upsmon.conf
:
FORCESSL 1
If you don’t use CERTVERIFY 1
, then this will at least make sure
that nobody can sniff your sessions without a large effort. Setting
this will make upsmon
drop connections if the remote upsd
doesn’t
support SSL, so don’t use it unless all of them have it running.
This section describes how to enable NUT SSL support using Mozilla NSS.
Install Mozilla NSS
as usual, either from source or binary packages. If using binary packages,
be sure to include the developer libraries, and nss-tools (for certutil
).
Recompile NUT from source, starting with configure --with-nss
.
Then install everything as usual.
NSS (package generally called libnss3-tools) will install a tool called
certutil
.
It will be used to generate certificates and manage certificate database.
Certificates should be signed by a certification authorities (CAs). Following commands are typical samples, contact your SSL guru or security officer to follow your company procedures.
Generate a server certificate for upsd
:
mkdir cert_db
certutil -N -d cert_db
certutil -A -d cert_db -n "My Root CA" -t "TC,," -a -i rootca.crt
certutil -R -d cert_db -s "CN=My nut server,O=MyCompany,ST=MyState,C=US" -a -o server.req
certutil -A -d cert_db -n "My nut server" -a -i server.crt -t ",,"
certutil -L -d cert_db
Clients and servers in the same host could share the same certificate to authenticate them or use different ones in same or different databases. The same operation can be done in same or different databases to generate other certificates.
NSS provides a way to create self-signed certificate which can acting as CA certificate, and to sign other certificates with this CA certificate. This method can be used to provide a CA certification chain without using an "official" certificate authority.
Generate a self-signed CA certificate:
mkdir CA_db
certutil -N -d CA_db
certutil -S -d CA_db -n "My Root CA" -s "CN=My CA,O=MyCompany,ST=MyState,C=US" -t "CT,," -x -2
(Do not forget to answer Yes
to the question "Is this a CA certificate [y/N]?")
upsd
(or upsmon
)
certificate database:
certutil -L -d CA_db -n "My Root CA" -a -o rootca.crt
certutil -C -d CA_db -c "My Root CA" -a -i server.req -o server.crt -2 -6
Just copy the database directory (just the directory and included 3
database .db files) to the right place, such as /usr/local/ups/etc/
:
mv cert_db /usr/local/ups/etc/
Edit the upsd.conf
to tell where find the certificate database:
CERTPATH /usr/local/ups/etc/cert_db
Also tell which is the certificate to send to clients to authenticate itself and the password to decrypt private key associated to certificate:
CERTIDENT "certificate name" "database password"
Generally, the certificate name is the server domain name, but is not a hard rule. The certificate can be named as useful.
This functionality is disabled by default. To activate it, recompile
NUT with WITH_CLIENT_CERTIFICATE_VALIDATION
defined:
make CFLAGS="-DWITH_CLIENT_CERTIFICATE_VALIDATION"
UPSD can accept three levels of client authentication. Just specify it with
the directive CERTREQUEST
with the corresponding value in the upsd.conf
file:
Like CA certificates, you can add many "trusted" client and CA certificates in server’s certificate databases.
In order for upsmon
to securely connect to upsd
, it must authenticate it.
You must associate an upsd
host name to security rules in upsmon.conf
with the directive CERTHOST
.
CERTHOST
associates a hostname to a certificate name. It also determines
whether a SSL connection is mandatory, and if the server certificate must be
validated.
CERTHOST "hostname" "certificate name" "certverify" "forcessl"
If the flag forcessl
is set to 1
, and upsd
answers that it can not
connect with SSL, the connection closes.
If the flag certverify
is set to 1
and the connection is done in SSL,
upsd
's certificate is verified and its name must be the specified
"certificate name"
.
To prevent security leaks, you should set all certverify
and forcessl
flags to 1
(force SSL connection and validate all certificates for all
peers).
You can specify CERTVERIFY
and FORCESSL
directive (to 1
or 0
) to
define a default security rule to apply to all host not specified with a
dedicated CERTHOST
directive.
If a host is not specified in a CERTHOST
directive, its expected certificate
name is its hostname.
Like upsd
, upsmon
may need to authenticate itself (upsd
's CERTREQUEST
directive set to REQUEST
or REQUIRE
).
It must access to a certificate (and its private key) in a certificate
database configuring CERTPATH
and CERTIDENT
in upsmon.conf
in the
same way as upsd
.
CERTPATH /usr/local/ups/etc/cert_db CERTIDENT "certificate name" "database password"
It should come back up without any complaints. If it says something about keys or certificates, then you probably missed a step.
If you run upsd
as a separate user ID (like nutsrv
), make sure that
user can read files in the certificate directory. NUT reads the keys and
certificates after forking and dropping privileges.
You should see something like this in the syslog from upsd
:
foo upsd[1234]: Client mon@localhost logged in to UPS [myups] (SSL)
If upsd
or upsmon
give any error messages, or the (SSL)
is missing,
then something isn’t right.
If in doubt about upsmon
, start it with -D
so it will stay in
the foreground and print debug messages. It should print something
like this every couple of seconds:
polling ups: myups@localhost [SSL]
Obviously, if the [SSL]
isn’t there, something’s broken.
Using tcpdump, Wireshark (Ethereal), or another network sniffer tool,
tell it to monitor port 3493/tcp and see what happens. You should only
see STARTTLS
go out, OK STARTTLS
come back, and the rest will be
certificate data and then seemingly random characters.
If you see any plaintext besides that (USERNAME, PASSWORD, etc.) then something is not working.
If you specify a certificate expiration date, you will eventually see things like this in your syslog:
Oct 29 07:27:25 rktoy upsmon[3789]: Poll UPS [for750@rktoy] failed - SSL error: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE: certificate verify failed
You can verify that it is expired by using openssl to display the date:
openssl x509 -enddate -noout -in <certfile>
It’ll display a date like this:
notAfter=Oct 28 20:05:32 2002 GMT
If that’s after the current date, you need to generate another cert/key pair using the procedure above.
SSL support should be considered stable but purposely under-documented since various bits of the implementation or configuration may change in the future. In other words, if you use this and it stops working after an upgrade, come back to this file to find out what changed.
This is why the other documentation doesn’t mention any of these directives yet. SSL support is a treat for those of you that RTFM.
There are also potential licensing issues for people who ship binary packages since NUT is GPL and OpenSSL is not compatible with it. You can still build and use it yourself, but you can’t distribute the results of it. Or maybe you can. It depends on what you consider "essential system software", and some other legal junk that we’re not going to touch.
Other packages have solved this by explicitly stating that an exception has been granted. That is (purposely) impossible here, since NUT is the combined effort of many people, and all of them would have to agree to a license change. This is actually a feature, since it means nobody can unilaterally run off with the source — not even the NUT team.
Note that the replacement of OpenSSL by Mozilla Network Security Services (NSS) should avoid the above licensing issues.
It has been possible to run the drivers and upsd
in a chrooted jail for
some time, but it involved a number of evil hacks. From the 1.3 series,
a much saner chroot behavior exists, using BIND 9 as an inspiration.
The old way involved creating an entire tree, complete with libraries, a shell (!), and many auxiliary files. This was hard to maintain and could have become an interesting playground for an intruder. The new way is minimal, and leaves little in the way of usable materials within the jail.
This document assumes that you already have created at least one user account for the software to use. If you’re still letting it fall back on "nobody", stop right here and go figure that out first. It also assumes that you have everything else configured and running happily all by itself.
Essentially, you need to create your configuration directory and state path in their own little world, plus a special device or two.
For the purposes of this example, the chroot jail is /chroot/nut
. The
programs have been built with the default prefix, so they are using
/usr/local/ups
. First, create the confpath and bring over a few files.
mkdir -p /chroot/nut/usr/local/ups/etc cd /chroot/nut/usr/local/ups/etc cp -a /usr/local/ups/etc/upsd.users . cp -a /usr/local/ups/etc/upsd.conf . cp -a /usr/local/ups/etc/ups.conf .
We’re using cp -a
to maintain the permissions on those files.
Now bring over your state path, maintaining the same permissions as before.
mkdir -p /chroot/nut/var/state cp -a /var/state/ups /chroot/nut/var/state
Next we must put /etc/localtime
inside the jail, or you may get very
strange readings in your syslog. You’ll know you have this problem if
upsd
shows up as UTC in the syslog while the rest of the system doesn’t.
mkdir -p /chroot/nut/etc cp /etc/localtime /chroot/nut/etc
Note that this is not cp -a
, since we want to copy the content, not
the symlink that it may be on some systems.
Finally, create a tiny bit of /dev
so the programs can enter the
background properly — they redirect file descriptors into the bit
bucket to make sure nothing else grabs fds 0-2.
mkdir -p /chroot/nut/dev cp -a /dev/null /chroot/nut/dev
Try to start your driver(s) and make sure everything fires up as before.
upsdrvctl -r /chroot/nut -u nutdev start
Once your drivers are running properly, try starting upsd
.
upsd -r /chroot/nut -u nutsrv
Check your syslog. If nothing is complaining, try running clients like
upsc
and upsmon
. If they seem happy, then you’re done.
After you do this, you will have two copies of many things, like the
confpath and the state path. I recommend deleting the "real"
/var/state/ups
, replacing it with a symlink to
/chroot/nut/var/state/ups
. That will let other programs reference the
.pid
files without a lot of hassle.
You can also do this with your confpath and point /usr/local/ups/etc
(or
equivalent on your system) at /chroot/nut/usr/local/ups/etc
unless you’re
worried about something hurting the files inside that directory. In that
case, you should maintain a "golden" copy and push it into the chroot path
after making changes.
The upsdrvctl
itself does not chroot, so the ups.conf
still needs to be
in the usual confpath.
This has not yet been applied to upsmon
, since it can be quite
complicated when there are notifiers that need to be run. One
possibility would be for upsmon
to have three instances:
This one is messy, and may not happen for some time, if ever.
This project is the result of years of work by many individuals and companies.
Many people have written or tweaked the software; the drivers, clients, server and documentation have all received valuable attention from numerous sources.
Many of them are listed within the source code, AUTHORS
file,
release notes, and mailing list archives, but some prefer to be anonymous.
Companies and organizations that have helped with various aspects of project
infrastructure are listed in
Acknowledgements of organizations which help with NUT CI and other daily operations (or README.adoc
in NUT sources for up-to-date information).
This software would not be possible without their help.
For an up to date list of NUT developers, refer to GitHub.
Eaton, has been the main NUT supporter in the past, between 2007 and 2011, continuing MGE UPS SYSTEMS efforts. In 2022, the Eaton NUT-based companion software bundle sources developed (pre-?)2013-2018 were contributed and re-licensed to become part of NUT. As such, Eaton has been:
supporting its customers using NUT.
The situation has evolved, and since 2011 Eaton does not support NUT anymore.
This may still evolve in the future.
But for now, please do not consider anymore that buying Eaton products will provide you with official support from Eaton, or a better level of device support in NUT.
Powercom, through Alexey Morozov, has provided extensive information on its USB/HID devices, along with development units.
They also have a page suggesting NUT as the software to support a wide range of their USB HID capable models.
If a company or individual isn’t listed here, then we probably don’t have enough information about the situation. Developers are kindly requested to report vendor contributions to the NUT team so this list may reflect their help, as well as convey a sense of official support (at least, that drivers were proposed according to the know-how coming from specs and knowledge about hardware and firmware capabilities, and not acquired via reverse engineering with a certain degree of unreliability and incompleteness). If we have left you out, please send us some mail or post a pull request to update this document in GitHub.
This document is defined by RFC 9271 published by IETF at https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9271 and is referenced as the document of record for the variable names and the instant commands used in the protocol described by the RFC.
On behalf of the RFC, this document records the names of variables
describing the abstracted state of an UPS or similar power distribution
device, and the instant commands sent to the UPS using command INSTCMD
,
as used in commands and messages between the Attachment Daemon (the upsd
in case of NUT implementation of the standard) and the clients.
This document defines the standard names of NUT commands and variables
(not to be confused with device status data described in
the docs/new-drivers.txt
in NUT source codebase).
Developers should use the names recorded here, with dstate functions and data mappings provided in NUT drivers for interactions with power devices.
If you need to express a state which cannot be described by any existing
name, please make a request to the NUT developers' mailing list for
definition and assignment of a new name. Clients using unrecorded names
risk breaking at a future update. If you wish to experiment with new
concepts before obtaining your requested variable name, you should use
a name of the form experimental.x.y
for those states.
Put another way: if you make up a name that is not in this list and it gets into the source code tree, and then the NUT community comes up with a better name later, clients that already use the undocumented variable will break when it is eventually changed. An explicitly "experimental" data point is less surprising in this regard.
Similarly, some source files (drivers/*-mib.c
and drivers/*-hid.c
)
may mention data point names following the pattern of unmapped.x.y
.
These are generated by helper scripts which walk the reports from SNMP
and USB HID devices, respectively scripts/subdriver/gen-snmp-subdriver.sh
and scripts/subdriver/gen-usbhid-subdriver.sh
, and assign names based on
strings in those reports. The unmapped
entries should not be exposed in
"production" builds of the NUT drivers. They are an aid for developers to
know that such entries are served by their device, so an existing standard
NUT name can be assigned for the concept (or new name negotiated with the
community), but are normally hidden with #if WITH_UNMAPPED_DATA_POINTS
clauses which can be enabled in custom NUT builds by use of
./configure --with-unmapped-data-points
option.
In the descriptions, "opaque" means programs should not attempt to parse the value for that variable as it may vary greatly from one UPS (or similar device) to the next. These strings are best handled directly by the user.
All standard NUT names of variables and commands are structured, with a certain domain-specific prefix and purpose-specific suffix parts. NUT tools provide and interpret them as dot-separated strings (although third-party tools might restructure them by cutting and pasting at the dot separation location, e.g. to represent as a JSON data tree or as data model classes for specific programming languages).
If you would be making a parser of this information, please do also note that in some but not all cases there is a defined data point for some reading or command at the "root level" of what evolved to be a collection of further structured related information (and there are no guarantees for future evolution in this regard), for example:
input.voltage
reports the momentary voltage level value and
there is a input.voltage.maximum
for a certain related detail;
input.transfer.reason
but there is no actual input.transfer
report.
There may be more layers than two (e.g. input.voltage.low.warning
),
and in certain cases detailed below there may be a variable component
in the practical values (e.g. the n
in ambient.n.temperature.alarm
variable or outlet.n.load.off
command names).
Depending on the use-case, decimal numbers may be represented as integers or as floating-point numbers with a dot character as the separator for the fractional part (typically one or two digits long). Leading zeroes may be present. Leading (negative) sign characters are possible, although use-cases for them are rare (if any).
Spaces or commas must not be used inside the numeric values.
Scientific notation (with mantissa/exponent) must not be used to represent numeric values set into variables, to serve the values as exact as we have them and keep the client-side parsing simple and predictable.
For example: "01200.2" and "1200.20" are valid, while "1,200.20" and "1200,20" and "1 200.20" and "1.2e4" are invalid.
Programming note: floating-point numbers should be emitted using the %f
format specifier in the C printf
family of methods and derived methods
(including NUT dstate_setinfo()
in the driver code). Specifiers like %e
and %g
which can emit the scientific notation should be avoided when setting
variable values (directly in code or when providing format string patterns in
mapping tables). They may however be used in debug traces, where reasonable.
Note that in some cases (e.g. USB vendor and product identifiers) technically numeric values may be reported as hexadecimal and should be treated generally as opaque strings (with the consumer ascribing a known meaning to certain variable names).
When possible, dates should be expressed in ISO 8601 and RFC 3339 compatible
Calendar format, that is to say "YYYY-MM-DD", or otherwise a Combined Date
and Time representation (<date>T<time>
, so "YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm").
Separators for the date (hyphen) and time (colon) components are required
to conform to both ISO 8601 "extended" format and RFC 3339 required format.
In the case of Date and Time representation, a timezone can be added as per RFC 3339 and the newer revisions of the ISO 8601 standard (which allow for negative offsets):
Z
for UTC (e.g. "YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmZ"), or
For more details see examples at Wikipedia page on ISO 8601 and the publicly available RFC at RFC 3339.
Other representations from those specifications are not necessarily supported.
Values of certain variables may be propagated from device reports formally as opaque strings, which happen to convey a date/time value (commonly the device or battery manufacture date, replacement date, last self-test or calibration time stamp, device clock, etc.) in some format, not necessarily a standard one.
While the drivers may convert them from original vendor-provided markup to the standard Time and Date format described above (if the formula is known for certain — e.g. which locale is used by the device, which part of that string is the year/month/day, or how to add offset or prefix for the year, etc.), they are not generally required to do so.
Some of these data will be redundant with ups.*
information
during a transition period. The ups.*
data will then be removed.
Name | Description | Example value |
---|---|---|
device.model | Device model | BladeUPS |
device.mfr | Device manufacturer | Eaton |
device.serial | Device serial number (opaque string) | WS9643050926 |
device.type | Device type (ups, pdu, scd, psu, ats) | ups |
device.description | Device description (opaque string) | Some ups |
device.contact | Device administrator name (opaque string) | John Doe |
device.location | Device physical location (opaque string) | 1st floor |
device.part | Device part number (opaque string) | 123456789 |
device.macaddr | Physical network address of the device | 68:b5:99:f5:89:27 |
device.uptime | Device uptime in seconds | 1782 |
device.count | Total number of daisychained devices | 1 |
device.usb.version | Device (firmware-reported) USB version | 01.29 |
When present, device.count
implies daisychain support. For more
information, refer to the NUT daisychain support notes chapter
of the user manual and developer guide.
Name | Description | Example value |
---|---|---|
ups.status | UPS status (opaque string comprised of space-separated tokens; many of those are ascribed certain meanings) | |
ups.alarm | UPS alarms (opaque string, may be a collection of whole sentences; separate entries may be enclosed in brackets for convenience, but this standard does not require it) | OVERHEAT [EEPROM Error] |
ups.time | Internal UPS clock time (opaque string) | 12:34 |
ups.date | Internal UPS clock date (opaque string) | 01-02-03 |
ups.model | UPS model | SMART-UPS 700 |
ups.mfr | UPS manufacturer | APC |
ups.mfr.date | UPS manufacturing date (opaque string) | 10/17/96 |
ups.serial | UPS serial number (opaque string) | WS9643050926 |
ups.vendorid | Vendor ID for USB devices | 0463 |
ups.productid | Product ID for USB devices | 0001 |
ups.firmware | UPS firmware (opaque string) | 50.9.D |
ups.firmware.aux | Auxiliary device firmware | 4Kx |
ups.temperature | UPS temperature (degrees C) | 042.7 |
ups.load | Load on UPS (percent) | 023.4 |
ups.load.high | Load when UPS switches to overload condition ("OVER") (percent) | 100 |
ups.id | UPS system identifier (opaque string) | Sierra |
ups.delay.start | Interval to wait before restarting the load (seconds) | 0 |
ups.delay.reboot | Interval to wait before rebooting the UPS (seconds) | 60 |
ups.delay.shutdown | Interval to wait after shutdown with delay command (seconds) | 20 |
ups.timer.start | Time before the load will be started (seconds) | 30 |
ups.timer.reboot | Time before the load will be rebooted (seconds) | 10 |
ups.timer.shutdown | Time before the load will be shutdown (seconds) | 20 |
ups.test.interval | Interval between self tests (seconds) | 1209600 (two weeks) |
ups.test.result | Results of last self test (opaque string) | Bad battery pack |
ups.test.date | Date of last self test (opaque string) | 07/17/12 |
ups.display.language | Language to use on front panel (* opaque) | E |
ups.contacts | UPS external contact sensors (* opaque) | F0 |
ups.efficiency | Efficiency of the UPS (ratio of the output current on the input current) (percent) | 95 |
ups.power | Current value of apparent power (Volt-Amps) | 500 |
ups.power.nominal | Nominal value of apparent power (Volt-Amps) | 500 |
ups.realpower | Current value of real power (Watts) | 300 |
ups.realpower.nominal | Nominal value of real power (Watts) | 300 |
ups.beeper.status | UPS beeper status (enabled, disabled or muted) | enabled |
ups.type | UPS type (* opaque) | offline |
ups.mode | Current UPS mode (see the note below) | line-interactive |
experimental.ups.mode.buzzwords | UPS mode details, not classified (opaque string, presumably comprised of space-separated tokens; see the note below) | vendor:eaton:ECO |
ups.watchdog.status | UPS watchdog status (enabled or disabled) | disabled |
ups.start.auto | UPS starts when mains is (re)applied | yes |
ups.start.battery | Allow to start UPS from battery | yes |
ups.start.reboot | UPS coldstarts from battery (enabled or disabled) | yes |
ups.shutdown | Enable or disable UPS shutdown ability (poweroff) | enabled |
When present, the value of ups.start.auto
has an impact on
shutdown.*
commands. For the sake of coherence, shutdown commands
will set ups.start.auto
to the right value before issuing the command.
That is, shutdown.stayoff
will first set ups.start.auto
to no
,
while shutdown.return
will set it to yes
.
When present, the value of ups.mode
specifies the currently enabled
mode of operation of the inverter and other components in the UPS.
Some devices are wired to only have one mode, others may support several
modes and usually have a way to select which one you want to be currently
active, either via protocol commands or by a physical switch.
There are many marketing keywords of different vendors and device generations that sometimes correspond to same or very similar concepts, other times overlap with wildly different meanings.
For example, some devices may be "online" (doing double-conversion and feeding the load from battery even when wall power is available) when charging or compensating for poor quality of input power, but become "line-interactive" or even power off some of their electronics when the input is deemed reliable.
The ups.mode
can have one of the following standard values, possibly
changing over time or never changing (for devices with one known mode):
online
: battery is always charging on one side, and always feeds the
inverter and so the load on the other (pros: instant protection from
outages; cons: higher overheads of the UPS itself, possibly faster wear
of the battery);
line-interactive
: battery is charged and then kept at rest, load is
fed from input, but in case of outage or other troubles the inverter
or other compensation mechanism (trim/buck) would be fired up (after
a small but non-trivial delay);
bypass
: inverter and battery are bypassed (e.g. for maintenance),
so input directly feeds the output, until it suddenly does not.
The experimental.ups.mode.buzzwords
can have one or more values, separated
by spaces, to provide information we know from the device but have not yet
agreed how to reflect it in a well-structured fashion (hence experimental
namespace is used):
vendor:VENDORNAME:MODENAME
: we know that the "vendor’s marketing
buzzword" mode is activated. Users may read vendor documentation for
their device model, and know better than the driver what this actually
means for them. It is recommended to keep vendor names lower-cased
and mode names upper-cased, for more deterministic matching and sorting
in NUT clients.
MODENAME
values/patterns may be interpreted by
upsmon(8) to produce notifications about entering or
exiting the "ECO" mode state.
Other values may be introduced later.
See also output.inverter.latency
.
When possible, time-stamps and dates should be expressed as detailed above in the Time and Date format chapter.
Name | Description | Example value |
---|---|---|
input.voltage | Input voltage (V) | 121.5 |
input.voltage.maximum | Maximum incoming voltage seen (V) | 130 |
input.voltage.minimum | Minimum incoming voltage seen (V) | 100 |
input.voltage.status | Status relative to the thresholds | critical-low |
input.voltage.low.warning | Low warning threshold (V) | 205 |
input.voltage.low.critical | Low critical threshold (V) | 200 |
input.voltage.high.warning | High warning threshold (V) | 230 |
input.voltage.high.critical | High critical threshold (V) | 240 |
input.voltage.nominal | Nominal input voltage (V) | 120 |
input.voltage.extended | Extended input voltage range | no |
input.transfer.delay | Delay before transfer to mains (seconds) | 60 |
input.transfer.reason | Reason for last transfer to battery (* opaque) | T |
input.transfer.low | Low voltage transfer point (V) | 91 |
input.transfer.high | High voltage transfer point (V) | 132 |
input.transfer.low.min | smallest settable low voltage transfer point (V) | 85 |
input.transfer.low.max | greatest settable low voltage transfer point (V) | 95 |
input.transfer.high.min | smallest settable high voltage transfer point (V) | 131 |
input.transfer.high.max | greatest settable high voltage transfer point (V) | 136 |
input.eco.switchable | Input High Efficiency (aka ECO) mode switch (opaque string) | normal |
input.sensitivity | Input power sensitivity | H (high) |
input.quality | Input power quality (* opaque) | FF |
input.current | Input current (A) | 4.25 |
input.current.nominal | Nominal input current (A) | 5.0 |
input.current.status | Status relative to the thresholds | critical-high |
input.current.low.warning | Low warning threshold (A) | 4 |
input.current.low.critical | Low critical threshold (A) | 2 |
input.current.high.warning | High warning threshold (A) | 10 |
input.current.high.critical | High critical threshold (A) | 12 |
input.feed.color | Color of the input feed (opaque string) | 3831236 |
input.feed.desc | Description of the input feed | Feed A |
input.frequency | Input line frequency (Hz) | 60.00 |
input.frequency.nominal | Nominal input line frequency (Hz) | 60 |
input.frequency.status | Frequency status | out-of-range |
input.frequency.low | Input line frequency low (Hz) | 47 |
input.frequency.high | Input line frequency high (Hz) | 63 |
input.frequency.extended | Extended input frequency range | no |
input.transfer.boost.low | Low voltage boosting transfer point (V) | 190 |
input.transfer.boost.high | High voltage boosting transfer point (V) | 210 |
input.transfer.trim.low | Low voltage trimming transfer point (V) | 230 |
input.transfer.trim.high | High voltage trimming transfer point (V) | 240 |
input.transfer.eco.low | Low voltage ECO transfer point (V) | 218 |
input.transfer.bypass.low | Low voltage Bypass transfer point (V) | 184 |
input.transfer.eco.high | High voltage ECO transfer point (V) | 241 |
input.transfer.bypass.high | High voltage Bypass transfer point (V) | 264 |
input.transfer.frequency.bypass.range | Frequency range Bypass transfer point (percent of nominal Hz) | 10 |
input.transfer.frequency.eco.range | Frequency range ECO transfer point (percent of nominal Hz) | 5 |
input.transfer.hysteresis | Threshold of switching protection modes, voltage transfer point (V) | 10 |
input.transfer.bypass.forced | Rule for allow auto Bypass switch (on/off) transfer modes (enabled or disabled) | enabled |
input.transfer.bypass.overload | Rule for auto transfer on Bypass when overload (enabled or disabled) | enabled |
input.transfer.bypass.outlimits | Rule for auto transfer on Bypass when out of tolerance (enabled or disabled) | enabled |
input.bypass.switchable | Input auto transfer on Bypass when overload or out of tolerance (enabled or disabled) | enabled |
input.bypass.switch.on | Automatically put the UPS in Bypass mode | on |
input.bypass.switch.off | Automatically take the UPS out of Bypass mode | disabled |
input.bypass.voltage | Input bypass voltage (V) | 233 |
input.bypass.frequency | Input bypass frequency (Hz) | 50 |
input.load | Load on (ePDU) input (percent of full) | 25 |
input.realpower | Current sum value of all (ePDU) phases real power (W) | 300 |
input.realpower.nominal | Nominal sum value of all (ePDU) phases real power (W) | 850 |
input.power | Current sum value of all (ePDU) phases apparent power (VA) | 500 |
input.source | The current input power source | 1 |
input.source.preferred | The preferred power source | 1 |
input.phase.shift | Voltage dephasing between input sources (degrees) | 181 |
The input voltage hysteresis concept refers to a specific behavior related to how some UPS models can handle changes in input voltage.
When the UPS is running normally (powered by utility or generator), it maintains a steady output voltage for your critical equipment. But what if the input voltage "wiggles" a bit due to fluctuations or other minor disturbances?
Rapid switching between UPS protection modes (utility power to battery and vice versa) can stress both the UPS and its connected devices.
So, some UPS models set up thresholds: If the input voltage drops below a certain "Low" level, the UPS won’t immediately switch to battery mode. Instead, it waits until it is sure the voltage stays consistently low for a bit. Similarly, if the input voltage rises above another threshold (the "High" level), the UPS won’t rush back to normal mode. It waits for stability.
By introducing hysteresis, such an UPS avoids unnecessary toggling, ensuring smoother transitions and better protection for your sensitive and expensive gear.
Name | Description | Example value |
---|---|---|
output.voltage | Output voltage (V) | 120.9 |
output.voltage.nominal | Nominal output voltage (V) | 120 |
output.frequency | Output frequency (Hz) | 59.9 |
output.frequency.nominal | Nominal output frequency (Hz) | 60 |
output.current | Output current (A) | 4.25 |
output.current.nominal | Nominal output current (A) | 5.0 |
output.inverter.latency | Delay of inverter activation when switching to battery (seconds, floating-point) | 0.01 |
One practical aspect that the users may be actually interested in is the
output.inverter.latency
, representing the time gap when an outage begins,
after the mains power has disappeared and before the inverter begins to feed
the load from battery. Typical values are 0 for double-conversion devices,
which always feed the load from battery, and 10msec (0.01 seconds in standard
units) for "line-interactive" devices which monitor input status and take time
to react to an outage or breach of thresholds. While common computer power
sources include elements that allow them to slide over such a short outage,
other protected devices (laser printers, Hi-Fi audio) might not, and would
restart.
See also ups.mode
and experimental.ups.mode.buzzwords
.
The additions for three-phase measurements would produce a very long table due to all the combinations that are possible, so these additions are broken down to their base components.
input.phases
(3 for three-phase, absent or 1 for 1phase)
output.phases
(as for input.phases
)
Any input or output is considered a valid DOMAIN.
input (should really be called input.mains, but keep this for compat)
output (should really be called output.load, but keep this for compat)
Voltage, current, frequency, etc are considered to be a specification of the measurement.
With this notation, the old 1phase naming scheme becomes DOMAIN.SPEC
Example: input.current
When in three-phase mode, we need some way to specify the target for most measurements in more detail. We call this the CONTEXT.
With this notation, the naming scheme becomes DOMAIN.CONTEXT.SPEC when in three-phase mode.
Example: input.L1.current
L1-L2 \ L2-L3 \ L3-L1 for voltage measurements L1-N / L2-N / L3-N /
L1 \ L2 for current and power measurements L3 / N - for current measurement
For cursory readers — the following couple of tables lists just the
short SPEC
component of the larger DOMAIN.CONTEXT.SPEC
naming scheme
for phase-aware values, as discussed in other sections of this chapter just
above. These are NOT to be used verbatim as complete data-point names!
Valid with/without context (i.e. per phase or aggregated/averaged)
Name | Description |
---|---|
alarm | Alarms for phases, published in ups.alarm |
current | Current (A) |
current.maximum | Maximum seen current (A) |
current.minimum | Minimum seen current (A) |
current.status | Status relative to the thresholds |
current.low.warning | Low warning threshold (A) |
current.low.critical | Low critical threshold (A) |
current.high.warning | High warning threshold (A) |
current.high.critical | High critical threshold (A) |
current.peak | Peak current |
voltage | Voltage (V) |
voltage.nominal | Nominal voltage (V) |
voltage.maximum | Maximum seen voltage (V) |
voltage.minimum | Minimum seen voltage (V) |
voltage.status | Status relative to the thresholds |
voltage.low.warning | Low warning threshold (V) |
voltage.low.critical | Low critical threshold (V) |
voltage.high.warning | High warning threshold (V) |
voltage.high.critical | High critical threshold (V) |
power | Apparent power (VA) |
power.maximum | Maximum seen apparent power (VA) |
power.minimum | Minimum seen apparent power (VA) |
power.percent | Percentage of apparent power related to maximum load |
power.maximum.percent | Maximum seen percentage of apparent power |
power.minimum.percent | Minimum seen percentage of apparent power |
realpower | Real power (W) |
powerfactor | Power Factor (dimensionless value between 0.00 and 1.00) |
crestfactor | Crest Factor (dimensionless value greater or equal to 1) |
load | Load on (ePDU) input |
Valid without context (i.e. aggregation of all phases):
Name | Description |
---|---|
frequency | Frequency (Hz) |
frequency.nominal | Nominal frequency (Hz) |
realpower | Current value of real power (Watts) |
power | Current value of apparent power (Volt-Amps) |
Partial Three phase — Three phase example:
input.phases: 3 input.frequency: 50.0 input.L1.current: 133.0 input.bypass.L1-L2.voltage: 398.3 output.phases: 3 output.L1.power: 35700 output.powerfactor: 0.82
Partial Three phase — One phase example:
input.phases: 3 input.L2.current: 48.2 input.N.current: 3.4 input.L3-L1.voltage: 405.4 input.frequency: 50.1 output.phases: 1 output.current: 244.2 output.voltage: 120 output.frequency.nominal: 60.0
Name | Description | Example value |
---|---|---|
battery.charge | Battery charge (percent) | 100.0 |
battery.charge.approx | Rough approximation of battery charge (opaque, percent) | <85 |
battery.charge.low | Remaining battery level when UPS switches to LB (percent) | 20 |
battery.charge.restart | Minimum battery level for UPS restart after power-off | 20 |
battery.charge.warning | Battery level when UPS switches to "Warning" state (percent) | 50 |
battery.charger.status | Status of the battery charger (see the note below) | charging |
battery.charger.type | Type of battery charger | ABM |
battery.voltage | Battery voltage (V) | 24.84 |
battery.voltage.cell.max | Maximum battery voltage seen of the Li-ion cell (V) | 3.44 |
battery.voltage.cell.min | Minimum battery voltage seen of the Li-ion cell (V) | 3.41 |
battery.voltage.nominal | Nominal battery voltage (V) | 024 |
battery.voltage.low | Minimum battery voltage, that triggers FSD status | 21,52 |
battery.voltage.high | Maximum battery voltage (i.e. battery.charge = 100) | 26,9 |
battery.capacity | Battery capacity (Ah) | 7.2 |
battery.capacity.nominal | Nominal battery capacity (Ah) | 8.0 |
battery.current | Battery current (A) | 1.19 |
battery.current.total | Total battery current (A) | 1.19 |
battery.status | Health status of the battery (opaque string) | ok |
battery.temperature | Battery temperature (degrees C) | 050.7 |
battery.temperature.cell.max | Maximum battery temperature seen of the Li-ion cell (degrees C) | 25.85 |
battery.temperature.cell.min | Minimum battery temperature seen of the Li-ion cell (degrees C) | 24.85 |
battery.runtime | Battery runtime (seconds) | 1080 |
battery.runtime.low | Remaining battery runtime when UPS switches to LB (seconds) | 180 |
battery.runtime.restart | Minimum battery runtime for UPS restart after power-off (seconds) | 120 |
battery.alarm.threshold | Battery alarm threshold | 0 (immediate) |
battery.date | Battery installation or last change date (opaque string) | 11/14/20 |
battery.date.maintenance | Battery next change or maintenance date (opaque string) | 11/13/24 |
battery.mfr.date | Battery manufacturing date (opaque string) | 2005/04/02 |
battery.packs | Number of internal battery packs | 1 |
battery.packs.bad | Number of bad battery packs | 0 |
battery.packs.external | Number of external battery packs | 1 |
battery.type | Battery chemistry (opaque string) | PbAc |
battery.protection | Prevent deep discharge of battery | yes |
battery.energysave | Switch off when running on battery and no/low load | no |
battery.energysave.load | Switch off UPS if on battery and load level lower (percent) | 5 |
battery.energysave.delay | Delay before switch off UPS if on battery and load level low (min) | 3 |
battery.energysave.realpower | Switch off UPS if on battery and load level lower (Watts) | 10 |
battery.charger.status
replaces the historic flags CHRG
and DISCHRG
that were exposed through ups.status
.
The battery.charger.status
can have one of the following values:
charging
: battery is charging,
discharging
: battery is discharging,
floating
: battery has completed its charge cycle,
and waiting to go to resting mode,
resting
: the battery is fully charged, and not charging nor discharging.
When possible, time-stamps and dates should be expressed as detailed above in the Time and Date format chapter.
n stands for the sensors index. A special case is "ambient.0" which is equivalent to "ambient" (without index), and represents the default sensor of the device. This is not to be confused with the device embedded sensor, which is published as ups.temperature. The most important data is "ambient.count", used to iterate over the whole set of outlets. For more information, refer to the NUT sensors management notes chapter of the user manual.
Name | Description | Example value |
---|---|---|
ambient.count | Total number of sensors | 2 |
ambient.n.name | Ambient sensor name | sensor 1 |
ambient.n.id | Ambient sensor identifier (opaque string) | 80f09325-2838-5637-b62a-cef9cbe2747 |
ambient.n.address | Ambient sensor address (opaque string) | 1 |
ambient.n.parent.serial | Ambient sensor parent serial number (opaque string) | U603E34000 |
ambient.n.mfr | Ambient sensor manufacturer | EATON |
ambient.n.model | Ambient sensor model | EMPDT1H1C2 |
ambient.n.firmware | Ambient sensor firmware | 01.03.0011 |
ambient.n.present | Ambient sensor presence | yes |
ambient.n.temperature | Ambient temperature (degrees C) | 25.40 |
ambient.n.temperature.alarm | Temperature alarm (enabled/disabled) | enabled |
ambient.n.temperature.status | Ambient temperature status relative to the thresholds | warning-low |
ambient.n.temperature.high | Temperature threshold high (degrees C) | 60 |
ambient.n.temperature.high.warning | Temperature threshold high warning (degrees C) | 40 |
ambient.n.temperature.high.critical | Temperature threshold high critical (degrees C) | 60 |
ambient.n.temperature.low | Temperature threshold low (degrees C) | 5 |
ambient.n.temperature.low.warning | Temperature threshold low warning (degrees C) | 10 |
ambient.n.temperature.low.critical | Temperature threshold low critical (degrees C) | 5 |
ambient.n.temperature.maximum | Maximum temperature seen (degrees C) | 37.6 |
ambient.n.temperature.minimum | Minimum temperature seen (degrees C) | 18.1 |
ambient.n.humidity | Ambient relative humidity (percent) | 038.8 |
ambient.n.humidity.alarm | Relative humidity alarm (enabled/disabled) | enabled |
ambient.n.humidity.status | Ambient humidity status relative to the thresholds | warning-low |
ambient.n.humidity.high | Relative humidity threshold high (percent) | 80 |
ambient.n.humidity.high.warning | Relative humidity threshold high warning (percent) | 70 |
ambient.n.humidity.high.critical | Relative humidity threshold high critical (percent) | 80 |
ambient.n.humidity.low | Relative humidity threshold low (percent) | 10 |
ambient.n.humidity.low.warning | Relative humidity threshold low warning (percent) | 20 |
ambient.n.humidity.low.critical | Relative humidity threshold low critical (percent) | 10 |
ambient.n.humidity.maximum | Maximum relative humidity seen (percent) | 60 |
ambient.n.humidity.minimum | Minimum relative humidity seen (percent) | 13 |
ambient.n.contacts.x.status | State of the dry contact sensor x | open |
ambient.n.contacts.x.config | Configuration of the dry contact sensor x | normal-open |
ambient.n.contacts.x.name | Name of the dry contact sensor x | smoke-detector1 |
NOTE: - ambient.n.contacts.x.status may either be the raw status (open or closed), or may relate to ambient.n.contacts.x.config. In this case, the value can be active or inactive.
n stands for the outlet index. A special case is "outlet.0" which is equivalent to "outlet" (without index), and represent the whole set of outlets of the device. The most important data is "outlet.count", used to iterate over the whole set of outlets. For more information, refer to the NUT outlets management and PDU notes chapter of the user manual.
Name | Description | Example value |
---|---|---|
outlet.count | Total number of outlets | 12 |
outlet.switchable | General outlet switch ability of the unit (yes/no) | yes |
outlet.n.id | Outlet system identifier (opaque string) | 1 |
outlet.n.name | Outlet name (opaque string) | A1 |
outlet.n.desc | Outlet description (opaque string) | Main outlet |
outlet.n.groupid | Identifier of the group to which the outlet belongs to | 1 |
outlet.n.switch | Outlet switch control (on/off) | on |
outlet.n.status | Outlet switch status (on/off) | on |
outlet.n.protect.status | Outlet protection status (opaque string) | protected |
outlet.n.alarm | Alarms for outlets and PDU, published in ups.alarm | outlet 1 low voltage warning |
outlet.n.switchable | Outlet switch ability (yes/no) | yes |
outlet.n.ecocontrol | Master Outlet used to automatically power off the slave outlets | The outlet is not ECO controlled |
outlet.n.designator | Outlet designator | AC OUTPUT |
outlet.n.autoswitch.charge.low | Remaining battery level to power off this outlet (percent) | 80 |
outlet.n.battery.charge.low | Remaining battery level to power off this outlet (percent) | 80 |
outlet.n.delay.shutdown | Interval to wait before shutting down this outlet (seconds) | 180 |
outlet.n.delay.start | Interval to wait before restarting this outlet (seconds) | 120 |
outlet.n.timer.shutdown | Time before the outlet load will be shutdown (seconds) | 20 |
outlet.n.timer.start | Time before the outlet load will be started (seconds) | 30 |
outlet.n.current | Current (A) | 0.19 |
outlet.n.current.maximum | Maximum seen current (A) | 0.56 |
outlet.n.current.status | Current status relative to the thresholds | good |
outlet.n.current.low.warning | Low warning threshold (A) | 0.10 |
outlet.n.current.low.critical | Low critical threshold (A) | 0.05 |
outlet.n.current.high.warning | High warning threshold (A) | 0.30 |
outlet.n.current.high.critical | High critical threshold (A) | 0.40 |
outlet.n.realpower | Current value of real power (W) | 28 |
outlet.n.voltage | Voltage (V) | 247.0 |
outlet.n.voltage.status | Voltage status relative to the thresholds | good |
outlet.n.voltage.low.warning | Low warning threshold (V) | 205 |
outlet.n.voltage.low.critical | Low critical threshold (V) | 200 |
outlet.n.voltage.high.warning | High warning threshold (V) | 230 |
outlet.n.voltage.high.critical | High critical threshold (V) | 240 |
outlet.n.powerfactor | Power Factor (dimensionless, value between 0 and 1) | 0.85 |
outlet.n.crestfactor | Crest Factor (dimensionless, equal to or greater than 1) | 1.41 |
outlet.n.power | Apparent power (VA) | 46 |
outlet.n.type | Physical outlet type | french |
This is a refinement of the outlet collection, providing grouped management for a set of outlets. The same principles and data than the outlet collection apply to outlet.group, especially for the indexing n and "outlet.group.count".
Most of the data published for outlets also apply to outlet.group, including: id, name (similar as outlet "desc"), color, status, current and voltage (including status, alarm and thresholds). Other actions and settings also apply ({delay,timer}.{shutdown,start})
Some specific data to outlet groups exists:
Name | Description | Example value |
---|---|---|
outlet.group.n.type | Type of outlet group (OPAQUE) | outlet-section |
outlet.group.n.color | Color-coding of the outlets in this group (OPAQUE) | yellow |
outlet.group.n.count | Number of outlets in the group | 12 |
outlet.group.n.phase | Electrical phase to which the physical outlet group (Gang) is connected to | L1 |
outlet.group.n.input | Input to which an outlet group is connected | 1 |
Example:
outlet.group.1.current: 0.00 outlet.group.1.current.high.critical: 16.00 outlet.group.1.current.high.warning: 12.80 outlet.group.1.current.low.warning: 0.00 outlet.group.1.current.nominal: 16.00 outlet.group.1.current.status: good outlet.group.1.id: 1 outlet.group.1.name: Branch Circuit A outlet.group.1.phase: L1 outlet.group.1.status: on outlet.group.1.voltage: 244.23 outlet.group.1.voltage.high.critical: 265.00 outlet.group.1.voltage.high.warning: 255.00 outlet.group.1.voltage.low.critical: 180.00 outlet.group.1.voltage.low.warning: 190.00 outlet.group.1.voltage.status: good ... outlet.group.count: 3.00
Name | Description | Example value |
---|---|---|
driver.name | Driver name | usbhid-ups |
driver.version | Driver version (NUT release) | X.Y.Z |
driver.version.internal | Internal driver version | 1.23.45 |
driver.version.data | Version of the internal data mapping, for generic drivers | Eaton HID 1.31 |
driver.version.usb | USB library version | libusb-1.0.21 |
driver.parameter.xxx | Parameter xxx (ups.conf or cmdline -x) setting | (varies) |
driver.flag.xxx | Flag xxx (ups.conf or cmdline -x) status | enabled (or absent) |
driver.state | Current state in driver’s lifecycle, primarily to help readers discern long-running init (with full device walk) or cleanup stages from the stable working loop | init.starting, init.quiet, init.device, init.info, init.updateinfo (first walk), reconnect.trying, reconnect.updateinfo, updateinfo, quiet, dumping, cleanup.upsdrv, cleanup.exit |
Name | Description | Example value |
---|---|---|
server.info | Server information | Network UPS Tools upsd vX.Y.Z - https://www.networkupstools.org/ |
server.version | Server version | X.Y.Z |
Name | Description |
---|---|
load.off | Turn off the load immediately |
load.on | Turn on the load immediately |
load.off.delay | Turn off the load possibly after a delay |
load.on.delay | Turn on the load possibly after a delay |
shutdown.default | Run default driver-defined (device-specific)
routine, primarily intended for emergency
poweroff performed as part of FSD handling;
often an alias to other |
shutdown.return | Turn off the load possibly after a delay and return when power is back |
shutdown.stayoff | Turn off the load possibly after a delay and remain off even if power returns |
shutdown.stop | Stop a shutdown in progress |
shutdown.reboot | Shut down the load briefly while rebooting the UPS |
shutdown.reboot.graceful | After a delay, shut down the load briefly while rebooting the UPS |
test.panel.start | Start testing the UPS panel |
test.panel.stop | Stop a UPS panel test |
test.failure.start | Start a simulated power failure |
test.failure.stop | Stop simulating a power failure |
test.battery.start | Start a battery test |
test.battery.start.quick | Start a "quick" battery test |
test.battery.start.deep | Start a "deep" battery test |
test.battery.stop | Stop the battery test |
test.system.start | Start a system test |
calibrate.start | Start runtime calibration |
calibrate.stop | Stop runtime calibration |
bypass.start | Put the UPS in Bypass mode |
bypass.stop | Take the UPS out of Bypass mode |
reset.input.minmax | Reset minimum and maximum input voltage status |
reset.watchdog | Reset watchdog timer (forced reboot of load) |
beeper.enable | Enable UPS beeper/buzzer |
beeper.disable | Disable UPS beeper/buzzer |
beeper.mute | Temporarily mute UPS beeper/buzzer |
beeper.toggle | Toggle UPS beeper/buzzer |
outlet.n.shutdown.return | Turn off the outlet possibly after a delay and return when power is back |
outlet.n.load.off | Turn off the outlet immediately |
outlet.n.load.on | Turn on the outlet immediately |
outlet.n.load.cycle | Power cycle the outlet immediately |
outlet.n.shutdown.return | Turn off the outlet and return when power is back |
The following commands were added to test feature support, but are not expected to last as part of NUT standard protocol in the long run.
Table C.1. Vendor-dependent "ECO" modes
Name | Driver/Devices | Description |
---|---|---|
experimental.ecomode.enable | usbhid-ups ⇒ mge-hid (Eaton/MGE) | Put UPS in High Efficiency (aka ECO) mode |
experimental.ecomode.disable | usbhid-ups ⇒ mge-hid (Eaton/MGE) | Take the UPS out of High Efficiency (aka ECO) mode |
experimental.ecomode.start.auto | usbhid-ups ⇒ mge-hid (Eaton/MGE) | Put UPS in Bypass mode then High Efficiency (aka ECO) mode |
experimental.ecomode.stop.auto | usbhid-ups ⇒ mge-hid (Eaton/MGE) | Take the UPS out of High Efficiency (aka ECO) mode after exiting Bypass mode |
experimental.essmode.enable | usbhid-ups ⇒ mge-hid (Eaton/MGE) | Put UPS in Energy Saver System (aka ESS) mode |
experimental.essmode.disable | usbhid-ups ⇒ mge-hid (Eaton/MGE) | Take the UPS out of Energy Saver System (aka ESS) mode |
Currently the commands above are present in one subdriver and are specific
to the vendor’s proposed power state machine. The plan is to generalize the
concept with vendor specifics, similarly to experimental.ups.mode.buzzwords
.
Refer to the online HCL.
Note: both developers contributing a driver and users using an existing driver
for device not previously documented as supported by it, are welcome to report
new data for the Devices Dumps Library (DDL) mentioned above. Best of all such
"data dump" reports can be prepared by the
./tools/nut-ddl-dump.sh
script from the main NUT codebase, and reported on the NUT mailing list or
via NUT issues on GitHub
or as a pull request against the
NUT Devices Dumps Library
following the naming and other rules described in the DDL documentation page.
Data dumps collected by the tools above, or by upsc
client, or by drivers
in exploratory data-dumping mode (with -d 1
argument), can be compared by
./tools/nut-dumpdiff.sh
script from the main NUT codebase, which strips away lines with only numeric
values (aiming to minimize the risk of losing meaningful changes like counters).
These are general information about UPS, PDU, ATS, PSU and SCD:
These are writeups by users of the software.
Video articles are also available:
NUT on my Pi, so my servers don’t die (Jeff Geerling) also including Home Assistant (HA) examples
There are various ways to obtain support for NUT.
If you have still not found a solution, you should search the lists before posting a question.
Someone may have already solved the problem:
search on the NUT lists using Google
Finally, you can subscribe to a NUT mailing list to:
Use the NUT Users mailing list.
In this case, be sure to include the following information:
complete problem description, with any relevant traces, like system log excerpts, and driver debug output. You can obtain the latter using the following command, running as root and after having stopped NUT:
/path/to/driver -DD -a <upsname>
If you don’t include the above information in your help request, we will not be able to help you!
Use the NUT Developers mailing list.
Refer to the NUT Developer Guide for more information, and the chapter on how to submit patches.
Note that the currently preferable way for ultimate submission of improvements is to post a pull request from your GitHub fork of NUT. Benefits of PRs include automated testing and merge-conflict detection and resolution, as well as tracking discussion that is often needed to better understand, integrate or document the patch.
Use the NUT Packagers mailing list.
Refer to the NUT Packager Guide for more information.
Yes, we’re open!
There is an official #nut
channel on https://libera.chat/ network.
Feel free to hang out with whoever is on-line at the moment, or watch reports from the NUT CI farm as they come.
Please don’t forget the basics of netiquette, such as that any help is done on a best-effort basis, people have other obligations, and are not always there even if their chat client is, and that respect and politeness are the norm (this includes doing some research before asking, and explaining the context where it is not trivial).
See https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues for another venue of asking (and answering) questions, as well as proposing improvements.
To report new Devices Dumps Library entries, posting an issue is okay, but posting a pull request is a lot better — easier for maintainers to review and merge any time. For some more detailed instructions about useful DDL reports, please see NUT DDL page.
Reported by Jonathan Laventhol
This cable is said to use the same wiring as 940-0024C clone.
Documents in this section are provided courtesy of Eaton.
The three first cables also applies to MGE UPS SYSTEMS and Eaton.
This cable is used on the more recent models, including Ellipse MAX, Protection Station, …
The following applies to the MGE 66102 NMC (Network Management Card), and possibly other models. The NMC connection is an 8P8C RJ45-style jack.
Signal | PC | NMC |
1,4,6 | ||
TxD | 2 | 3 |
RxD | 3 | 6 |
GND | 5 | 4 |
7,8 | ||
shield | shield |
This cable is used also on the more recent models, including Ellipse MAX, Protection Station, …
This cable can be used with the following models:
T700, T1000, T1500, T1500j, T700h, T1000h, T1500h, R1500, R1500j, R1500h, T2000, T2000j, T2400h, T2400h-NA, R3000 / R3000j, R3000h, R3000h-International, R3000h-NA, R6000h-NA, R6000i, R6000j.
UPS PC 9 pin connector 1 --------- 3 2 --------- 2 4 -\ 4 --------- 5 | 6 -/ 6 --------- 7
Contributed by Kjell Claesson and Arnaud Quette.
Many Best Power units (including the Patriot Pro II) have a female DB-9 socket with a non-standard pinout.
Signal | PC | UPS |
1,4,6 | NC | |
TxD | 2 | 2 |
RxD | 3 | 1 |
GND | 5 | 4 |
7,8 | NC |
Sources:
For more information about build environment setup, see chapters about
Prerequisites for building NUT on different OSes (or docs/config-prereqs.txt
in NUT sources for up-to-date information) and
Custom NUT CI farm build agents: LXC multi-arch containers (or docs/ci-farm-lxc-setup.txt
in NUT sources for up-to-date information).
As many other projects relying on GNU autotools for build recipe automation,
NUT sources deliver a configure
script which is used to set up numerous
nuances relevant for your build of the project. Most of the configuration
requirements are passed by --with-something
or --enable-something
options
(allegedly, not always used consistently with autotools naming recommendations),
and with environment variables like CFLAGS
typically also passed as command
line options.
Default syntax of --with-something
or --enable-something
assumes a boolean
approach, so the option as such conveys a yes
string value, and aliases
--without-something
or --disable-something
are handled automatically as
a no
string value, for the option named something
.
In many cases, these options are used to pass non-boolean configuration of the option in question, commonly a path, program name, compiler flags to use along with a particular dependency, user name or type of documentation to build, etc.
A special case here concerns options that accept an auto
value, where the
configure
script would opine to request a final yes
or no
, depending on
other circumstances of the build environment and requested configuration.
When building NUT from Git sources rather than the distribution tarballs,
you would have to generate the configure
script and some further needed
files by running ./autogen.sh
. This in turn may require additional tools
and other dependencies on your build environment (referenced just a bit
below). For common developer iterations, porting to new platforms,
or in-place testing, running the ./ci_build.sh
script can be a helpful
one-stop solution.
The NUT Packager Guide, which presents the best practices for installing and integrating NUT, is also a good reading.
The Prerequisites for building NUT on different OSes (or docs/config-prereqs.txt
in NUT sources for up-to-date information)
document suggests prerequisite packages with tools and dependencies
available and needed to build and test as much as possible of NUT on
numerous platforms, written from perspective of CI testing (if you
are interested in getting updated drivers for a particular device,
you might select a sub-set of those suggestions).
There are a few options reviewed below that can be given to configure
script to tweak your compilations. See also ./configure --help
for a
current and complete listing for the current version of the codebase.
NUT tracks configure
options used during build, so you can view them
to produce a replacement by asking NUT programs for --help
or for
--version
with debugging enabled (first), e.g.:
:; upsd -DV Network UPS Tools upsd 2.8.1 Network UPS Tools version 2.8.1 configured with flags: --with-all=auto --with-doc=skip ...
A more industrial approach is to use lib/libupsclient-config --config-flags
,
where supported. Note that the pkg-config
manifest libupsclient.pc
does
not easily convey this information.
--enable-keep_nut_report_feature
If this option is enabled (not currently default), the report displayed
by configure
script will be kept in a file when the script ends, and
installed into the data directory.
A common situation for NUT builds is to verify whether current version of the codebase (e.g. recent and not-yet-packaged release, or a Git branch) solves some issues of an existing deployment. Such tests are simplified if the new build of NUT plays by the same systems integration rules as the already deployed (e.g. package-delivered) version, specifically about filesystem access permissions and configuration file locations.
--enable-inplace-runtime
Tries to detect and pre-set configure
defaults for run-time settings
(which you can still override if needed, but no longer must specify
explicitly to be on same page as the existing setup), most notably:
--sysconfdir
--with-user
--with-group
If the installed NUT version supports reporting of CONFIG_FLAGS
used
during its build, the configure
script will try to take those values
into account when running in this mode (and so use the same program and
data installation paths, for example).
This does not currently rely on the configuration report optionally
installed by --enable-keep_nut_report_feature
above, but might do so
eventually.
Build and install the serial drivers (default: yes)
--with-usb
Build and install the USB drivers (default: auto-detect)
Note that you need to install the libusb development package or files, and that both libusb 0.1 and 1.0 are supported. In case both are available, libusb 1.0 takes precedence, and will be used by default.
It is however possible to override this default choice by explicitly
calling --with-usb=libusb-0.1
or --with-usb=libusb-1.0
.
If you do specify the version to use (or yes
for auto-detection),
this option would fail if requested (or any) libusb version was not
found. The default auto
value would not fail in such case.
If you intend to use the libmodbus
variant with libusb
support, you would require libusb-1.0
specifically; the implementation
or "compat API" of 0.1
is not supported by that library version.
--with-snmp
Build and install the SNMP drivers (default: auto-detect)
Note that you need to install libsnmp development package or files.
--with-net-snmp-config
In addition to the --with-snmp
option above, this one allows to provide
a custom program name (in PATH
) or complete pathname to net-snmp-config
(may have copies named per architecture, e.g. net-snmp-config-32
and
net-snmp-config-64
).
This may be needed on build systems which support multiple architectures,
or in cases where your distribution names this program differently.
With a default value of yes
it would mean preference of this program,
compared to information from pkg-config
, if both are available.
--with-neon
Build and install the XML drivers (default: auto-detect)
Note that you need to install neon development package or files.
--with-powerman
Build and install Powerman PDU client driver (default: auto-detect)
This allows to interact with the Powerman daemon, and the numerous Power Distribution Units (PDU) supported by the powerman project.
Note that you need to install powerman development package or files.
--with-ipmi --with-freeipmi
Build and install IPMI PSU driver (default: auto-detect)
This allows to monitor numerous Power Supply Units (PSU) found on servers.
Note that you need to install freeipmi (0.8.5 or higher, for nut-scanner; and 1.0.1 or higher, for nut-ipmipsu) development package or files.
--with-linux_i2c
Build and install i2c drivers (default: auto-detect)
Note that you need to install libi2c development package or files.
--with-gpio
Build and install GPIO drivers (default: auto-detect)
Note that on Linux you need to install libgpiod library and development package or files. This seems to be present in distributions released after roughly 2018. Other platforms are not currently supported, but may be in the future.
--with-modbus
Build and install modbus (Serial, TCP) drivers (default: auto-detect)
Note that you need to install libmodbus development package or files.
--with-modbus+usb
Require a variant of libmodbus with RTU USB support. This feature is
currently not available in upstream project or OS distribution packages,
so your NUT build environment should provide a prerequisite build of
https://github.com/networkupstools/libmodbus/tree/rtu_usb (may be a
static library build, used from a temporary installation prefix location,
to avoid potential conflicts with the OS packaged shared library).
You would also need specifically libusb-1.0
(not the older API).
At the time of this writing, such constraint can be desirable for the apc_modbus(8) driver which supports different communication media.
For more details please see https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/wiki/APC-UPS-with-Modbus-protocol
--with-drivers=<driver>,<driver>,...
Specify exactly which driver or drivers to build and install (this works for serial, usb, and snmp drivers, and overrides the preceding three options).
As of the time of original writing (2010), there are 46 UPS drivers available. Most users will only need one, a few will need two or three, and very few people will need all of them.
To save time during the compile and disk space later on, you can
use this option to just build and install a subset of the drivers.
For example, to select mge-shut
and usbhid-ups
, you’d do this:
--with-drivers=apcsmart,usbhid-ups
If you need to build more drivers later on, you will need to rerun
configure
with a different list. To make it build all of the
drivers from scratch again, run make clean
before starting.
--with-cgi (default: no)
Build and install the optional CGI programs, HTML files, and sample CGI configuration files. This is not enabled by default, as they are only useful on web servers. See data/html/README for additional information on how to set up CGI programs.
--with-nut-scanner (default: auto)
Build and install the optional nut-scanner(8) tool to discover some types of UPS or ePDU devices on locally or remotely connected media (such as Serial, USB, SNMP, IPMI, NetXML), as well as NUT data servers (by Avahi/mDNS broadcasts or "old" NUT port polling) and simulation device configurations that can be relayed by a local dummy-ups(8) driver instance.
Many of the features depend on third-party libraries that are loosely linked at run-time using libltdl, and due to that, the build, delivery and use of the tool does not depend on all of them being available in the final deployment.
--with-nutconf (default: auto)
Build and install the optional nutconf(8) tool to create and manipulate NUT configuration files. It also optionally supports device scanning, using the nutscan(3) library (if built), to suggest configuration of devices.
--with-docs=<output-format(s)> (default: no) --with-doc=<output-format(s)> (default: no)
Build and install NUT documentation file(s). Note: --with-doc
is a legacy
NUT option, and --with-docs
is an alias that matches the more wide-spread
equivalent in different packaging frameworks and projects.
This feature requires AsciiDoc 8.6.3 or newer (see https://asciidoc.org).
The possible documentation type values are:
html-single
for single page HTML,
html-chunked
for multi-paged HTML,
pdf
for a PDF file, and
man
for the usual man pages.
Other values understood for this option are listed below:
--with-doc
argument is passed without a list, or specifies
just =yes
or =all
, it enables all supported formats with a =yes
to require them.
--with-doc=auto
argument tries to enable all supported
formats with an =auto
but should not fail the build if something
can not be generated.
--with-doc=no
quietly skips generation of all types of documentation,
including man pages.
--with-doc=skip
is used to configure some of the make distcheck*
scenarios to re-use man page files built and distributed by the main
build and not waste time on re-generation of those.
--with-doc=dist-auto
allows to use pre-distributed MAN pages if present
(should be in "tarball" release archives; should not be among Git-tracked
sources; may be left over from earlier builds in same workspace), or build
those if we can (the auto
part). Practically this is implemented in detail
only for --with-doc=man=dist-auto
, as we do not dist HTML and PDF products;
it is a placeholder for those to simplify the generic configuration calls.
Multiple documentation format values can be specified, separated with comma.
Each such value can be suffixed with =yes
to require building of this one
documentation format (abort configuration if tools are missing), =auto
to
detect and enable if we can build it on this system (and not abort if we
can not), and =no
(or =skip
) to explicitly skip generation of this
document format even if we do have the tools to build it.
If a document format is mentioned in the list without a suffix, then it is
treated as a =yes
requirement.
Verbose output can be enabled using: ASCIIDOC_VERBOSE=-v make
Example valid formats of this flag:
--with-doc
without an argument, effectively same as --with-doc=yes
--with-doc=
is a valid empty list, effectively same as --with-doc=no
--with-doc=auto
--with-doc=pdf,html-chunked
--with-doc=man=no,pdf=auto,html-single
Additional flags with regard to documentation generation include:
--with-docs-man-section-api=<SN> (default: 3) --with-docs-man-section-cfg=<SN> (default: 5) --with-docs-man-section-cmd-sys=<SN> (default: 8) --with-docs-man-section-cmd-usr=<SN> (default: 1)
Customize man page section identifiers for operating systems whose standards
do not match defaults listed above for Library and API, Configuration Files,
System Management Commands and User Commands sections (e.g. Solaris-derived
systems might use --with-docs-man-section-cmd-sys=1m
). This impacts not only
file names of the manual pages, but also cross-links in generated documents.
Note that use of these flags does not implicitly enable any --with-docs=...
mode, which should still be specified explicitly.
NUT includes a client binding PyNUT
module, as well as an optional GUI
application NUT-Monitor
(not to be confused with nut-monitor
service
name for upsmon
as delivered by some OS distribution packages). Both
python 2.7 and several versions of python 3.x are supported and regularly
tested by NUT CI farm builds; other versions may work or not.
Also some of the source configuration (including activity in autogen.sh
script and later in certain Makefile`s during build) relies on presence
of `python
(and perl
) interpreters. If they are not available, e.g. on
older operating systems, certain features are skipped — but you may have
to export
special environment variables to signal to autogen.sh
that
this is an expected situation (it would suggest which, for your current
NUT version).
For CI builds (or similar reproducible developer activity) performed
with ci_build.sh
— since this is an area which impacts both configure
script generation by the helper autogen.sh
script and subsequently the
choices made by the configure
script itself, settings can be made by
exporting the PYTHON
environment variable which should evaluate to some
way to call the correct interpreter (e.g. python2.7
, /usr/bin/env python
or /usr/bin/python3
).
The configure
script does support equivalent options, whose defaults
come from detection of certain program names by current PATH
setting.
Further use of these interpreter names and other paths during NUT build
and installation is managed by Makefile variable expansion, as prepared
by the configure
script.
Also note that it is not required to use the same PYTHON
implementation
for autogen.sh
to do its job, and for the configure
script option.
As noted above, both python-2.x and python-3.x variants are supported.
You can consult the m4/nut_check_python.m4
file for detection methods used.
If both interpreter generations are present, and a particular un-versioned
PYTHON
is not specified or detected, then selected/detected PYTHON3
is
chosen as the ultimate PYTHON
value.
For majority of uses in the build procedure and products, the generation
of Python does not matter and the un-versioned PYTHON
value is substituted
into files as the script shebang, used to find the site-packages
location,
etc.
One exception is generation of NUT-Monitor GUI application which has been
separated for NUT-Monitor-py2gtk2
and NUT-Monitor-py3qt5
due to further
backend platform technical differences — these build products specifically
use PYTHON2
and PYTHON3
substitutions. They may be co-installed on the
same system. A dispatcher shell script NUT-Monitor
is used to launch the
preferred (newest) or the only existing implementation.
Please note that by default NUT tries to make use of everything in your
build environment, so if both Python generation are detected — the binding
module will be delivered into both, and two versions of NUT-Monitor GUI
application will be installed. If you want to avoid that behaviour on a
build system with both interpreters present, you can explicitly specify
to build e.g. --without-python2 --with-python=/usr/bin/python-3.9
.
The settings below may be of particular interest to non-distribution packaging efforts with their own dedicated directory trees:
--with-python=SHEBANG_PATH
Specify a definitive version you want used for majority of the Python code (except version-dependent scripts, see above).
The SHEBANG_PATH
should be a full program pathname, optionally with
one argument, e.g. /usr/bin/python-3.9
or /usr/bin/env python2
.
Defaults (in order):
* python
, python3
or python2
program if present in PATH
by such name,
* or the newest of PYTHON3
or PYTHON2
values (specified or detected below).
--with-python2=SHEBANG_PATH --with-python3=SHEBANG_PATH
For version-dependent scripts (see above) or to default the newest Python
version if not specified by --with-python
option or detected otherwise,
you can provide the preferred version and implementation of Python 2 or 3
respectively.
Conversely, if neither of these configure options were specified, but some
--with-python
program was specified or detected, and its report says it
has Python major version 2 or 3, then the versioned interpreter string would
point to that.
--with-nut_monitor
Install the NUT-Monitor GUI application (depending on Python 2 or 3 version
availability), and optional desktop-file-install
integration).
--with-pynut
Install the PyNUT module files for general consumption into "site-packages" location of the currently chosen Python interpreter(s): yes, no, auto. or dedicated as the required dependency of NUT-Monitor application (app).
The module files are installed into a particular Python version’s location
such as /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
even if you specify a relaxed
or un-versioned interpreter like python2
(which would be used in scripts
for the NUT-Monitor application and possible other consumers of the module).
If the preferred Python version in the deployed system changes later (so the
python2
symlink for this example would point elsewhere) the module import
would become not resolvable for such consumers, until it is installed into
that other Python’s "site-packages" location.
--with-dev (default: no)
Build and install the upsclient and nutclient library and header files, to build further projects against NUT (such as wmNUT client and many others).
Also delivers libnutscan
library and header files, if --with-nut-scanner
is enabled.
Disabled development file delivery, in particular, disables installation of static libraries.
--with-dev-libnutconf (yes/no/auto, default: no)
Build and install the nutconf library and header files, to build further
projects against NUT (especially those that need to set it up). This is
currently not automatically tied into either --with-dev
nor --with-nutconf
(note below on --with-all
), because the tool and library are experimental
and the API may yet undergo significant changes in the coming years.
It is more recommended to use the CLI tool as a presumably more stable API for third-party integrations, than the library directly.
This feature may however be enabled or disabled implicitly, using
--with-all(=yes/no/auto)
request, based on a combination of
--with-nutconf
and --with-dev
options:
--without-all
, default to set --with-dev-libnutconf=no
; otherwise…
--without-dev
or --without-nutconf
,
default to set --with-dev-libnutconf=no
; otherwise…
--without-dev=auto
and/or --without-nutconf=auto
,
default to set --with-dev-libnutconf=auto
; otherwise…
--with-dev
and --with-nutconf
,
default to set --with-dev-libnutconf=yes
.
Requires C++11 support to be enabled (available in compiler, not neutered by explicit selection of an older standard).
--enable-ldflags-nut-rpath (yes/no/auto/flags, default: auto) --enable-ldflags-nut-rpath-cxx (yes/no/auto/flags, default: auto)
NUT development files include the *.pc
metadata for pkg-config
ecosystem
and a legacy libupsclient-config
script, both used to deliver compiler and
linker options for third-party programs to build against NUT libraries.
There can be a problem during run-time, when NUT is installed into a location
that the system linker does not know to look into, e.g. the default --prefix
value of /usr/local/ups
, that the built programs fail to dynamically link
with the shared objects of NUT libraries, unless deprecated tricks like the
LD_LIBRARY_PATH
setting are applied.
These options allow NUT to add linker options, which set "RPATH" in consumer binaries, to the announced metadata. As a result, third-party programs or libraries are hard-coded to look for NUT libraries in a certain location, in addition to system locations and similar paths added by other dependencies.
By default (in auto
mode), the configure
script queries the compiler for
known system library paths (currently supported with GCC and CLANG builds),
and checks the NUT libdir
against that list. If there is a hit, no extra
flags are announced; otherwise, the format detected for currently used linker
by autoconf libtool macros is added to the announced metadata for builds
against NUT. If this causes problems, you can either --disable-...
these
flags or provide the desired string explicitly.
--enable-spellcheck (default: auto)
Activate recipes for documentation source file spelling checks with aspell
tool. Default behavior depends on availability of the tool, so if present — it would run for make check
by default, to facilitate quicker acceptance
of contributions.
--enable-check-NIT (default: no)
Add make check-NIT
to default activity of make check
to run the
NUT Integration Testing suite. This is potentially dangerous (e.g. due
to port conflicts when running many such tests in same environment),
so not active by default.
--enable-maintainer-mode (default: no)
Use maintainer mode to keep Makefile.in
and Makefile
in sync with
ever-changing Makefile.am
content after Git updates or editing.
--enable-cppcheck (default: no)
Activate recipes for static analysis with cppcheck
tools (if available).
--with-unmapped-data-points (default: no)
Build SNMP and USB-HID subdrivers with entries discovered by the scripts
which generated them from data walks, but developers did not rename yet
to NUT mappings conforming to docs/nut-names.txt
standards. Production
driver builds must not include any non-standard names.
--enable-NUT_STRARG-always (default: auto)
Enable the NUT_STRARG
macro (to handle NULL
string printing) even
if the system libraries seem to safely support this behavior natively?
This flag should primarily help against overly zealous static analysis
tools in recent compiler generations. The auto
value enables the flag
for certain compiler versions known to complain about some of our use
cases — even though those seem to be false positives.
--enable-configure-debug
Cause the configure
script run to report some internal values of variables as
it goes through making of choices, to help recipe developers troubleshoot it.
--with-all (no default)
Build and install all of the above (the serial, USB, SNMP, XML/HTTP and PowerMan drivers, the CGI programs and HTML files, and the upsclient library).
You can also use --with-all=auto
to detect available prerequisites and
only build everything that we can build on this system (but not fail due
to inability to request a build of something from the full scope).
--with-ssl (default: auto-detect) --with-nss (default: auto-detect) --with-openssl (default: auto-detect)
Enable SSL support, using either Mozilla NSS or OpenSSL.
If both are present, and nothing was specified, OpenSSL support will be preferred.
Read docs/security.txt for instructions on SSL support.
Currently the two implementations differ in supported features.
--with-wrap (default: auto-detect)
Enable libwrap (tcp-wrappers) support.
Refer to upsd(8) man page for more information.
--with-avahi (default: auto-detect)
Build and install Avahi support, to publish NUT server availability using mDNS protocol. This requires Avahi development files for the Core and Client parts.
--with-libltdl (default: auto-detect)
Enable libltdl (Libtool dlopen abstraction) support.
This is required to build nut-scanner
which loads third-party libraries
dynamically, based on requested scanning options. This allows to build and
package the tool without requiring all possible dependencies to be installed
in each run-time environment.
--with-port=PORT
Change the TCP port used by the network code. Default is 3493 as registered with IANA.
Ancient versions of upsd
used port 3305. NUT 2.0 and up use a
substantially different network protocol and are not able to
communicate with anything older than the 1.4 series.
If you have to monitor a mixed environment, use the last 1.4 version, as it contains compatibility code for both the old "REQ" and the new "GET" versions of the protocol.
--with-user=<username> --with-group=<groupname>
See also --enable-inplace-runtime
.
Programs started as root
will setuid()
to <username>
for somewhat
safer operation. You can override this with -u <otheruser>
in several
programs, including upsdrvctl
(and all drivers by extension), upsd
,
and upsmon
. The "user" directive in ups.conf
overrides this at run
time for the drivers.
upsmon
does not totally drop root
because it may need to
initiate a shutdown. There is always at least a stub process
remaining with root
powers. The network code runs in another
(separate) process as the new user.
The <groupname>
is used for the permissions of some files,
particularly the hotplugging rules for USB. The idea is that the
device files for any UPS devices should be readable and writable by
members of that group.
The default value for both the username and groupname is nobody
(or nogroup
on systems that have it when configure
script runs).
This was done since it’s slightly better than staying around as
root
. Running things as nobody
is not a good idea, since it’s a
hack for NFS access. You should create at least one separate user
for this software.
If you use one of the --with-user
and --with-group
options, then
you have to use the other one too.
See the INSTALL.nut document and the FAQ for more on this topic.
--with-logfacility=FACILITY
Change the facility used when writing to the log file. Read the man
page for openlog
to get some idea of what’s available on your system.
Default is LOG_DAEMON
.
Sometimes as a developer or user you need to interact with a device for which a "proper" NUT driver does not yet exist (or is not in your version), but some proof-of-concept script can be good enough to collect some data.
In some cases, an UPS does not support local monitoring at all, but has a network port for cloud-based monitoring through its vendor’s portal.
Such data can be converted and fed into the NUT dummy-ups
driver, and so
represented in the NUT ecosystem, by rewriting the "sequence" file whose
contents it processes in a loop (see dummy-ups(8) for more details).
NUT provides sample scripts for such integration, which can be used if you
have a suitable use-case, or provide inspiration for you to begin experiments
with a new device and (as often happens) a shell or Python script polling
it for information. For more details, see scripts/external_apis
in NUT
sources (and pull requests with more integrations would be welcome there).
--enable-extapi-enphase=(yes|auto|no)
Enable installation of integration script for External API: Enphase Monitor (default: no)
--prefix=PATH
This is a fairly standard option with GNU autoconf, and it sets the
base path for most of the other install directories. The default
is /usr/local/ups
, which puts everything but the state sockets in one
easy place, and does not conflict with usual distribution packaging.
If you like having things to be at more of a "system" level, setting
the prefix to /usr/local
or even /usr
might be better.
--exec_prefix=PATH
This sets the base path for architecture dependent files. By
default, it is the same as <prefix>
.
--sysconfdir=PATH
Changes the location where NUT’s configuration files are stored.
By default this path is <prefix>/etc
. Setting this to /etc/nut
or
/etc/ups
might be useful. See also --enable-inplace-runtime
.
The NUT_CONFPATH
environment variable overrides this at run time.
--sbindir=PATH --bindir=PATH
Where executable files will be installed. Files that are normally
executed by root (upsd
, upsmon
, upssched
) go to <sbindir>
,
all others to <bindir>
. The defaults are <exec_prefix>/sbin
and
<exec_prefix>/bin
respectively.
See also --with-drvpath
below.
--with-drvpath=PATH
The UPS drivers will be installed to this path. By default they
install to <exec_prefix>/bin
, i.e. /usr/local/ups/bin
.
You would want a location that remains mounted when most of the system
is prepared to turn off, so some distributions package NUT drivers into
/lib/nut
or similar. See config-notes.txt detailing how to
set up system shutdown.
The driverpath
global directive in the ups.conf
file overrides this
at run time.
--datadir=PATH
Change the data directory, i.e., where architecture independent
read-only data for the currently built project is installed.
By GNU Autotools default, this is <prefix>/share
(same as the
system-wide "data root" which we also consult for third-party data
such as Augeas lens delivery locations), i.e. /usr/local/ups/share
.
+
Typically this is reconfigured to a '${datarootdir}/nut'
value.
+
At the moment, this directory only holds two files by default — the
optional cmdvartab
and driver.list
, but may hold additional data
on certain systems (e.g. FreeBSD quirks, Solaris SMF or init methods,
sometimes documentation).
--mandir=PATH
Sets the base directories for the man pages. The default is
<prefix>/man
, i.e. /usr/local/ups/man
.
--includedir=PATH
Sets the path for include files to be installed when --with-dev
is
selected. For example, upsclient.h
is installed here. The default
is <prefix>/include
.
--libdir=PATH
Sets the installation path for libraries. Depending on the build
configuration, this can include the libupsclient
, libnutclient
,
libnutclientsub
, libnutscan
and their pkg-config metadata (see
--with-pkgconfig-dir
option). The default is <exec_prefix>/lib
.
--libexecdir=PATH
Sets the installation path for "executable libraries" — helper scripts
or programs that are not intended for direct and regular use by people,
and rather are implementation details of services. Depending on the
build configuration, this can include the nut-driver-enumerator.sh
,
sockdebug
, and others. The default is <exec_prefix>/libexec
.
Package distributions may want to use this option to customize this path
to include the package name, e.g. set it to <exec_prefix>/libexec/nut
.
--with-pkgconfig-dir=PATH
Where to install pkg-config *.pc
files. This option only has an
effect if --with-dev
is selected, and causes a pkg-config file to
be installed in the named location. The default is
<exec_prefix>/pkgconfig
.
Use --without-pkgconfig-dir
to disable this feature altogether.
--with-cgipath=PATH
The CGI programs will be installed to this path. By default, they
install to <exec_prefix>/cgi-bin
, which is usually
/usr/local/ups/cgi-bin
.
If you set the prefix to something like /usr
, you should set the
cgipath
to something else, because /usr/cgi-bin
is pretty ugly and
non-standard.
The CGI programs are not built or installed by default. Use
./configure --with-cgi
to request that they are built and
installed.
--with-htmlpath=PATH
HTML files will be installed to this path. By default, this is
<prefix>/html
. Note that HTML files are only installed if
--with-cgi
is selected.
--with-hotplug-dir=PATH
Where to install Linux 2.4 hotplugging rules. The default is to use
/etc/hotplug
, if that directory exists, and to not install it
otherwise. Note that this installation directory is not a
subdirectory of <prefix>
by default. When installing NUT as a
non-root user, you may have to override this option.
Use --without-hotplug-dir
to disable this feature altogether.
--with-udev-dir=PATH
Where to install Linux 2.6 hotplugging rules, for kernels that have
the "udev" mechanism. The default is to use /etc/udev
, if that
directory exists, and to not install it otherwise. Note that this
installation directory is not a subdirectory of <prefix>
by
default. When installing NUT as a non-root user, you may have to
override this option.
Use --without-udev-dir
to disable this feature altogether.
--with-systemdsystemunitdir=PATH
Where to install Linux systemd unit definitions. Useless and harmless on other OSes, including Linux distributions without systemd, just adding a little noise to configure script output.
Use --with-systemdsystemunitdir=auto
(default) to detect the settings
using pkg-config if possible.
Use --with-systemdsystemunitdir(=yes)
to require detection of these
settings with pkg-config, or fail configuration if not possible.
Use --with-systemdsystemunitdir=no
to disable this feature altogether.
--with-systemdsystempresetdir=PATH
Where to install Linux systemd unit presets (lists of services enabled or disabled by default). Useless and harmless on other OSes, including Linux distributions without systemd, just adding a little noise to the configure script output.
Use --with-systemdsystempresetdir=auto
(default) to detect the settings
using pkg-config if possible.
Use --with-systemdsystempresetdir(=yes)
to require detection of these
settings with pkg-config, or fail configuration if not possible.
Use --with-systemdsystempresetdir=no
to disable this feature altogether.
--with-systemdshutdowndir=PATH
Where to install Linux systemd unit definitions for shutdown handling. Useless and harmless on other OSes, including Linux distributions without systemd, just adding a little noise to configure script output.
Use --with-systemdshutdowndir
to detect the settings using pkg-config.
Use --with-systemdshutdowndir=no
to disable this feature altogether.
--with-systemdtmpfilesdir=PATH
Where to install Linux systemd configuration for tmpfiles handling (the automatically created locations for PID, state and similar run-time files). Useless and harmless on other OSes, including Linux distributions without systemd, just adding a little noise to configure script output.
Use --with-systemdtmpfilesdir
to detect the settings using pkg-config.
Use --with-systemdtmpfilesdir=no
to disable this feature altogether.
--with-libsystemd=(auto|yes|no) --with-libsystemd-includes=CFLAGS --with-libsystemd-libs=LDFLAGS
If the build system provides libsystemd
headers, NUT binaries can be
built with tighter integration to this service management framework.
In this case NUT daemons (upsd
, upsmon
, upslog
and drivers) would
report their life-cycle milestones (READY
, RELOADING
, STOPPING
) and
support the watchdog reports (if enabled in their respective units by
end-user — not done by default since the numbers depends on monitoring
system performance). Default: "auto" (integration enabled if detected).
--with-augeas-lenses-dir=PATH
Where to install Augeas configuration-management lenses.
Only useful and valid if you use Augeas to parse and modify configuration
files. The default is to use /usr/share/augeas/lenses
, if that directory
exists, and to not install it otherwise.
--with-pidpath=PATH
Changes the directory where NUT pid files are stored for processes running
as root
. By default this is /var/run
. Certain programs like upsmon
will leave files here.
--with-altpidpath=PATH
Programs that normally don’t have root
powers, like the drivers and
upsd
, write their PID files here. By default this is whatever the
statepath (below) is, as those programs should be able to write there.
The NUT_ALTPIDPATH
environment variable overrides this at run time.
--with-statepath=PATH
Change the default location of the local Unix sockets created by the drivers
to interact with the data server upsd
to report their state and receive
commands. Default is /var/state/ups
.
This is also the default location for non-root
daemons to write a PID file,
if a separate location is not specified by --with-altpidpath
option.
The NUT_STATEPATH
environment variable overrides this at run time.
Fun fact: in early iterations of the NUT project, the drivers and the data server did exchange information by writing and reading complete state files in a commonly accessible location, hence the name.
--with-powerdownflag=FILEPATH
Change the default location (full filename path) of the POWERDOWNFLAG
created by upsmon
(as root
) to tell the late-shutdown integration
that this machine should tell all UPSes for which it is a "primary" NUT
server to cut power to the load. Default is /etc/killpower
on POSIX
systems and "C:\\killpower"
(note the double backslashes) on Windows.
--with-pkg-config
This option allows to provide a custom program name (in PATH
) or a
complete pathname to pkg-config
which describes CFLAGS
, LIBS
and
possibly other build-time options in *.pc
files, to use third-party
libraries. On build systems which support multiple architectures you
may also want to set PKG_CONFIG_PATH
to match your current build.
--with-gd-includes="-I/foo/bar"
If you installed libgd
in some place where your C preprocessor can’t
find the header files, use this switch to add additional -I
flags.
--with-gd-libs="-L/foo/bar -labcd -lxyz"
If your copy of libgd
isn’t linking properly, use this to give the
proper -L
and -l
flags to make it work. See LIBS=
in gd’s Makefile
.
the --with-gd
switches are not necessary if you have gd 2.0.8
or higher installed properly. The gdlib-config
script or pkg-config
manifest will be detected and used by default in that situation.
--with-gdlib-config
This option allows to provide a custom program name (in PATH
) or
a complete pathname to gdlib-config
. This may be needed on build
systems which support multiple architectures, or in cases where your
distribution names this program differently.
--with-libusb-config
This option allows to provide a custom program name (in PATH
) or
a complete pathname to libusb-config
(usually delivered only for
libusb-0.1 version, but not for libusb-1.0). This may be needed on
build systems which support multiple architectures or provide several
versions of libusb, or in cases where your distribution names this
program differently.
--with-ssl-includes, --with-usb-includes, --with-snmp-includes, --with-neon-includes, --with-libltdl-includes, --with-powerman-includes="-I/foo/bar"
If your system doesn’t have pkg-config
and support for any of the above
libraries isn’t found (but you know it is installed), you must specify
the compiler flags that are needed.
--with-ssl-libs, --with-usb-libs, --with-snmp-libs, --with-neon-libs, --with-libltdl-libs --with-powerman-libs="-L/foo/bar -R/foo/bar -labcd -lxyz"
If system doesn’t have pkg-config
or it fails to provides hints for
some of the settings that are needed to set it up properly and the
build in defaults are not right, you can specify the correct values
for your system here.
This file lists changes that affect users who installed older versions of this software. When upgrading from an older version, be sure to check this file to see if you need to make changes to your system.
For packaging (OS distribution or in-house) it is recommended to
primarily ./configure --with-all
and then excise --without-something
explicitly for items not supported on your platform, so you do not miss
out on new NUT features as they come with new releases. Some may require
that you update your build environment with new third-party dependencies,
so a broken build of a new NUT release would let you know how to act.
This is a good time to point out that for stricter packaging systems, it may
be beneficial to add --enable-option-checking=fatal
to the ./configure
command line, in order to quickly pick up any other removed option flags.
VERSION_DEFAULT
file, so it can be used without git. Certain distros
can benefit from a VERSION_FORCED
file or a NUT_VERSION_FORCED
environment variable exported from their build system, e.g. via
echo NUT_VERSION_FORCED=1.1.1 > VERSION_FORCED
. Unfortunately, some
appliances tag all software the same with their firmware version;
if this is required, a (NUT_)VERSION_FORCED_SEMVER envvar or file can
help identify the actual NUT release version triplet used on the box.
Please use it, it immensely helps with community troubleshooting!
Documentation about this would be maintained in docs/nut-versioning.adoc
[issue #1949]
nut-systemd.preset
file to enable or
disable certain NUT units by default; its comments document each choice.
[issue #2721]
nut-udev-settle.service
was introduced to replace dependency on the
systemd-udev-settle.service
which is deprecated and causes warnings on
some systems. It was shown to benefit NUT use-cases however. [#2638]
make package
should now separate the
PACKAGE_VERSION
from the platform-dependent prefix by a dash character
in the ultimate package file name. Previously they were glued together
for some platform targets (HPUX, Solaris). Solaris SVR4 package file names
should new differentiate i386
vs. amd64
and sparc
vs. sparcv9
,
depending on target_cpu
of the build. If you had any scripts relying
on the older pattern, they may have to be updated.
make dist
goal now takes more care to require availability of the
man pages to put into the prepared distribution archive. Development and CI
builds on platforms unable to fulfill this goal can use make distcheck-ci
(and make dist-ci
) to fake presence of pre-built man pages with placeholder
files, to complete other aspects of distcheck
validation. [#2842]
PyNUTClient
module tarball should now use a
lower-cased file name (and immediate versioned directory name inside) to
match the requirements of PEP-0625.
The Python module name (and its directory) should remain camel-cased.
OS distribution package recipes that deliver the module separately (e.g.
as part of Python ecosystem rather than NUT) may have to adjust. [#2773]
make install
should now deliver also xx_YY.UTF-8
pattern named symbolic links to the
short-named directories and files involved, since some platforms insist
on having those for translations to be found — this should be reflected
in OS packaging recipes as well. [#2845]
New libupsclient
API methods added:
upscli_str_add_unique_token()
and upscli_str_contains_token()
,
to help C NUT clients process ups.status
and similarly structured
strings same way as NUT core code base. [#2852, #2859]
upscli_set_default_connect_timeout()
to modify the internal timeout
used by upscli_connect()
(default 0 still means blocking connections,
positive values should time-limit the connection attempts), and
upscli_get_default_connect_timeout()
to retrieve its copy. [#2847]
libupsclient
and libnutscan
export more symbols now,
and so were bumped to new "current" numbers; this may impact the naming
of shared object files to be delivered by updated packaging. [#2895]
upsc
, upscmd
, upsrw
, upslog
, upsmon
,
upsimage
, upsset
and upsstats
) were updated to default with a 10-second
connection establishment timeout in case of name resolution lags or
unresponsive hosts (notably a problem with upsmon
contacting many remote
systems at once). This may potentially impact NUT deployments which somehow
relied on the blocking behavior of these clients; you can use the
NUT_DEFAULT_CONNECT_TIMEOUT
environment variable to fix this. [#2847]
upscmd
, upsrw
, upsimage
, upsset
,
upsstats
, and upslog
(during reconnection), did not UPSCLI_CONN_TRYSSL
so went plaintext even when secure connections were possible. Fixed to at
least try being secure, same way as upsc
does for a long time. This may
cause console or log messages when SSL can not be initialized, you can use
the NUT_QUIET_INIT_SSL
environment variable to suppress them where the
cryptography is known to be not set up, so the warnings bring no value. [#2847]
lib/*.pc.in
: propagate -R/PATH
(or equivalent — as detected by the
configure
script for the currently used compiler and linker toolkits)
in pkg-config
metadata pointing to NUT library installation location
(by default not in system prefix) to help third-party clients link with us
automatically. If this causes issues, --disable-ldflags-nut-rpath(-cxx)
options (or --enable...="..."
with specific linker arguments) can help.
[#2782, #2865]
configure
script options to specify that
manual sections on the target platform differ from (Linux-based) defaults
hard-coded into page sources; this should allow to simplify NUT packaging
recipe maintenance in distributions (no more updating patches for changed
or added documentation sources)
upsmon
should now integrate natively with systemd-driven OS sleep events
(built with systemd version 221 or newer "inhibitor interface"), so various
hacks previously packaged into /usr/lib/systemd/system-sleep/
scripts or
units requiring/conflicting with the sleep.target
may be obsolete.
For fallback with older systemd, a nut-sleep.service
is provided now.
[#1070, #2596, #2597]
upslog
as a nut-logger
service (disabled by default, needs a upslog.conf
file to deliver the
UPSLOG_ARGS=...
setting for actual monitoring and logging). [#1803]
ALARM
state was introduced to upsmon
, allowing it
to optionally treat it as a factor in deciding that the device is in a
"critical" state (polled more often, assumed dead if communications are
lost). Since it is up to devices and their NUT drivers what they would
raise as an alarm (might be something as mundane as ECO mode being active),
some alarms can contribute to unwanted/early shutdowns. For this reason
a 0|1
setting ALARMCRITICAL
was introduced into upsmon.conf
(default
is 1
), for such users to be able to prevent their upsmon
from treating
the ALARM
status as overly severe when it is not in fact. [#2658, #415]
usbhid-ups
and netxml-ups
updated to handle "No battery installed!"
alarm also to set the RB
(Replace Battery) value in ups.status
.
This may cause dual triggering of notifications (as an ALARM
generally
and as an important REPLBATT
status in particular) in upsmon
, but
better safe than sorry. [#415]
usbhid-ups
subdriver PowerCOM HID
seemingly sent UPS shutdown
and
stayoff
commands in wrong byte order, at least for devices currently
in the field. Driver now sends the commands in a way that satisfies new
devices; just in case a flag toggle powercom_sdcmd_byte_order_fallback
was added to set the old behavior (if some devices do need it). [PR #2480]
usbhid-ups
subdriver CyberPower HID
default pollfreq
sped up to
12 seconds (common default is 30 seconds). Feedback is welcome if this
improves connection stability or overwhelms the UPS controller instead.
[issue #1689, PR #2718]
usbhid-ups
subdriver CyberPower HID
default offdelay
is set to 60
and ondelay
to 120 seconds, in accordance with man page suggestions;
users with custom settings not divisible by 60 will be loudly warned. [#1394]
snmp-ups
subdriver netvision-mib
: synchronized netvision_output_info
with the currently available SOCOMECUPS-MIB.txt
; this can impact some
other devices using that MIB (negatively, if the older mappings were
indeed correct for any practical cases, and were not a typo). [#2803]
nutdrv_qx
fixed hunnox_protocol()
to honour the optional novendor
setting for devices that are confused by such query (e.g. DEXP LCD EURO
1200VA); it may be remotely possible that some other devices could begin
to misbehave due to this fix — please let us know then. [#2839]
mge-utalk
driver will no longer set non-standard status values COMMFAULT
and ALARM
(for a specific status bit); instead, it will set modern
ups.alarm
with values COMMFAULT
and/or DEVICEALARM
(and raise
an ALARM
in ups.status
for either, as standard alarms go). If your
clients (e.g. custom parsing scripts) for devices supported by this driver
depended on those non-standard tokens in ups.status
, they would have to
be updated to handle the new token values in ups.alarm
instead. [#2708]
lbrb_log_delay_sec=N
setting to delay propagation of
LB
or LB+RB
state (buggy with APC BXnnnnMI devices/firmwares issued
circa 2023-2024 which flood the logs with spurious LOWBATT and REPLACEBATT
events). This may work better for some devices when combined with flags
like onlinedischarge_calibration
and lbrb_log_delay_without_calibrating
.
[#2347]
docdir
. It seems previously they were only
built (if requested) but not installed via make
, unlike the common man
pages which are delivered automatically. Packaging recipes can likely
be simplified now. [#2445]
NUT_DEBUG_SYSLOG
environment variable was introduced to tweak activation
of syslog message emission (and related detachment of stderr
when daemons
are backgrounding), which can be useful for systemd service units. It can be
set via nut.conf
file for all standard consumers, or patched/dropped-in to
systemd unit definitions specifically (less recommended, but may be easier
to package). The positive effect would be avoiding duplicate logging as both
syslog
and stderr
ending up in the same journal. [#2394]
CHANGELOG_REQUIRE_GROUP_BY_DATE_AUTHOR
setting was added (for make
calls and used by tools/gitlog2changelog.py.in
script), and it defaults
to true
allowing for better ordered documents at the cost of some memory
during document generation. Resource-constrained builders (working from
a Git workspace, not tarball archives) may have to set it to false
when
calling make
for NUT. [#2510]
STATEPATH
via ups.conf
to match upsd
custom configuration ability; in fact, the data server would prefer the
value from ups.conf
over the one in upsd.conf
, if both are present.
Note that NUT_STATEPATH
environment variable trumps both. [issue #694]
nut-scanner
, which dynamically load shared libraries
at run-time without persistent pre-linking, should now know the library
file names that were present during build (likely encumbered with version
suffixes), and prefer them over plain libname.so
patterns used previously
(which on some platforms are only delivered by development packages as
symlinks). Packaging recipes can likely be simplified now: some distros
certainly did patch NUT source to similar effect). [#2431]
nut-scanner
and symbols that its libnutscan.so
delivers have caused a library version bump. New methods have been added
and one structure (nutscan_ipmi_t
) updated in a (hopefully) backwards
compatible manner. [PR #2523, issue #2244 and numerous PRs for it]
nutconf
tool added to main codebase with NUT v2.8.2 release could be
packaged as a single program (with just a dependency on libnutscan
), e.g.
the library code with configuration file processing logic was built into it.
Starting with NUT v2.8.3, the libnutconf
may optionally be built as a
standalone shared library, to deliver for development of integrations using
--with-dev-libnutconf
option. In this case the nutconf
tool program would
also depend on it for run-time linking. This may have to be considered in
packaging recipes. [#2828]
sendsignalpid()
and sendsignalfn()
methods,
which can impact NUT forks which build using libcommon.la
and similar
libraries. Added new last argument with const char *progname
(may be
NULL
) to check that we are signalling an expected program name when we
work with a PID. With the same effort, NUT programs which deal with PID
files to send signals (upsd
, upsmon
, drivers and upsdrvctl
) would
now default to a safety precaution — checking that the running process
with that PID has the expected program name (on platforms where we can
determine one). This might introduce regressions for heavily customized
NUT builds (e.g. embedded in NAS or similar devices) whose binary file
names differ significantly from a progname
defined in the respective
NUT source file, so a boolean NUT_IGNORE_CHECKPROCNAME
environment
variable support was added to optionally disable this verification.
Also the NUT daemons should request to double-check against their
run-time process name (if it can be detected). [issue #2463]
More environment variable support was added to NUT programs, primarily
aimed at wrappers such as init scripts and service unit definitions,
allowing to tweak what (and whether) they write into debug traces, and
so "make noise" or "bring invaluable insights" to logs or terminal;
they can generally be used for services and init scripts via nut.conf
:
configure
script option to build --with-modbus+usb
was added to
let the caller insist on the use of USB-capable libmodbus (or fail the
NUT build attempt). Certain build arguments can default this option to
become enabled (implicitly): configure --with-modbus --with-usb
and
either --with-drivers=*apc_modbus*
(actually implies --with-modbus
)
or --with-modbus-includes=... --with-modbus-libs=...
as a way to avoid surprises with custom NUT builds aiming to have an
USB-capable apc_modbus
driver (currently this requires a custom-built
libmodbus, can be a static build to avoid conflicts with OS). [#2666]
configure
script option to --enable-NUT_STRARG-always
was added
to enable the NUT_STRARG
macro (to handle NULL
string printing)
even if system libraries seem to safely support this behavior natively.
This should primarily help against overly zealous static analysis tools
in recent compiler generations. [#2585]
language standard revision via
CFLAGS
and CXXFLAGS
should again be honoured. There was a mishap
with the m4
scripting for autoconf
which could have caused use of
C11/C
11 if compiler supported it, regardless of a request. [PR #2306]
$datadir
e.g. /usr/local/share/nut
and need to be pasted into your /boot/loader.conf.local
). [#2159]
bus
, busport
and device
values when generating device configurations by default. They may
appear as comments, or enabled by specifying the -U
command-line
option several times. [#2221]
tools/gitlog2changelog.py.in
script was revised, in particular to
convert section titles (with contributor names) into plain ASCII character
set, for dblatex
versions which do not allow diacritics and other kinds
of non-trivial characters in sections. A number of other projects seem to
use the NUT version of the script, and are encouraged to look at related
changes in configure.ac
and Makefile.am
recipes. [PR #2360, PR #2366]
*.adoc
pattern. Newly, a release-notes.pdf
and HTML
equivalents are generated. Packages which deliver documentation may need
to update the lists of files to ship. [#1953] Developers may be impacted
by new configure --enable-spellcheck
toggle (should add spelling checks
to make check
by default, if tools are available) to facilitate quicker
acceptance of contributions. Packaging systems may now want to explicitly
disable it, if it blocks package building (pull requests to update the
docs/nut.dict
are a better and welcome solution). [#2067]
Several improvements regarding simultaneous support of USB devices that were previously deemed "identical" and so NUT driver instances did not start for all of them:
ups.conf
options for that [#1763], and man pages were
updated to reflect that [#1766];
nut-scanner
tool should suggest these options in its generated
device configuration [#1790]: hopefully these would now suffice for
sufficiently unique combinations;
nut-scanner
tool should also suggest sanity-check violations
as comments in its generated device configuration [#1810], e.g. bogus
or duplicate serial number values;
allow_duplicates
flag (caveat emptor!) which may help monitor several related no-name
devices on systems that do not discern "bus" and "device" values
(although without knowing reliably which one is which… sometimes it
is better than nothing) [#1756].
int
type). Now such
entities are named TYPE_FD
, TYPE_FD_SER
or TYPE_FD_SOCK
with some
helper macros to name and determine "invalid" values (closed file, etc.)
Some of these changes happened in NUT header files, and at this time it
was not investigated whether the set of files delivered for third-party
code integration (e.g. C/C++ projects binding with libnutclient
or
`libupsclient) is consistent or requires additional definitions/files.
If something gets broken by this, it is a bug to address in future [#1556]
Further revision of public headers delivered by NUT was done, particularly
to address lack of common data types (size_t
, ssize_t
, uint16_t
,
time_t
etc.) in third-party client code that earlier sufficed to only
include NUT headers. Sort of regression by NUT 2.8.0 (note those consumers
still have to re-declare some numeric variable types used) [#1638]
make install
of PyNUT module and NUT-Monitor desktop
application — such activity was earlier done by packages directly; now
the packaging recipes may use NUT source-code facilities and package just
symlinks as relevant for each distro separately [#1462, #1504]
upsd.conf
listing of LISTEN
addresses was previously inverted
(the last listed address was applied first), which was counter-intuitive
and fixed for this release. If user configurations somehow relied on this
order (e.g. to prioritize IPv6 vs. IPv4 listeners), configuration changes
may be needed. [#2012]
upsd
configured to listen on IPv6 addresses should handle only
IPv6 (and not IPv4-mappings like it might have done before) to avoid
surprises and insecurity — if user configurations somehow relied on
this dual support, configuration changes may be needed to specify both
desired IP addresses. Note that the daemon logs will now warn if a
host name resolves to several addresses (and will only listen on the
first hit, as it did before in such cases). [#2012]
LISTEN *
directives became specified, to try
handling both IPv4 and IPv6 "any" address (subject to upsd
CLI options
to only choose one, and to OS abilities). This use-case may be practically
implemented as a single IPv6 socket on systems with enabled and required
IPv4-mapped IPv6 address support, or as two separate listening sockets -
logged messages to this effect (e.g. inability to listen on IPv4 after
opening IPv6) are expected on some platforms. End-users may also want to
reconfigure their upsd.conf
files to remove some now-redundant LISTEN
lines. [#2012]
make sockdebug
for easier developer access to the tool;
also if configure --with-dev
is in effect, it would now be installed to
the configured libexec
location. A man page was also added. [#1936]
--with-gpio
configure script option) -
this may impact packaging decisions on some (currently Linux released 2018+)
distributions going forward [#1855]
configure --with-nut-scanner
toggle was added, specifically
so that build environments requesting --with-all
but lacking libltdl
would abort and require the packager either to install the dependency
or explicitly forfeit building the tool (some distro packages missed it
quietly in the past) [#1560]
upsdebugx_report_search_paths()
method in NUT common code was added,
and exposed in libnutscan.so
builds in particular - API version for the
public library was bumped [#317]
Some environment variable support was added to NUT programs, primarily aimed at wrappers such as init scripts and service unit definitions, allowing to tweak what (and whether) they write into debug traces, and so "make noise" or "bring invaluable insights" to logs or terminal:
NUT_DEBUG_LEVEL=NUM
envvar allows to temporarily boost debugging
of many daemons (upsd
, upsmon
, drivers, upsdrvctl
, upssched
)
without changes to configuration files or scripted command lines. [#1915]
NUT_DEBUG_PID
envvar (presence) support was added to add current
process ID to tags with debug-level identifiers. This may be useful
when many NUT daemons write to the same console or log file, such as
in containers/plugins for Home Assistant, storage appliances, etc. [#2118]
NUT_QUIET_INIT_SSL
envvar (presence or "true" value) prevents
libupsclient
consumers (notoriously upsc
) from reporting whether
they have initialized SSL support. [#1662]
NUT_QUIET_INIT_UPSNOTIFY
envvar (presence or "true" value)
prevents daemons which can notify service management frameworks (such
as systemd) about passing their lifecycle milestones, to not report
loudly if they could not do so (e.g. running on a system without a
framework, or misconfigured so they could not report and the OS would
restart the false-positively "unresponsive" service). [#2136]
configure
script, reference init-script and packaging templates updated
to eradicate @PIDPATH@/nut
ambiguity in favor of @ALTPIDPATH@
for the
unprivileged processes vs. @PIDPATH@
for those running as root [#1719]
configure
script can now be retained and installed by using the
--enable-keep_nut_report_feature
option; packagers are welcome to make
use of this, to better keep track of their deliveries [#1826, #1708]
Renamed generated nut-common.tmpfiles(.in) ⇒ nut-common-tmpfiles.conf(.in) to install a /usr/lib/systemd-tmpfiles/*.conf pattern [#1755]
WatchdogSec=
values are currently NOT pre-set into systemd
unit file templates provided by NUT, this is an exercise for end-users
based on sizing of their deployments and performance of monitoring station
[#1590, #1777]
mibs
)
were renamed: pw
is now eaton_pw_nm2
, and pxgx_ups
is eaton_pxg_ups
[#1715]
tools/gitlog2changelog.py.in
script was revised, in particular to
generate the ChangeLog
file more consistently with different versions
of Python interpreter, and without breaking the long file paths in the
resulting mark-up text. Due to this, a copy of this file distributed with
NUT release archives is expected to considerably differ on first glance
from its earlier released versions (not just adding lines for the new
release, but changing lines in the older releases too) [#1945, #1955]
nut-driver@instances
and the nut-driver-enumerator
to manage their population), as well as
updated Python 2 and Python 3 support (again, maybe dictating different
package groups) as detailed below.
--with-dev
and so may impact upsclient
and nutclient
(C++) consumers.
At the very least, binaries for those consumers should be rebuilt to remain
stable with NUT 2.8.0 and not mismatch int-type sizes and other arguments.
nutdrv_qx
framework
for USB and Serial connected devices, not as updates/clones of older e.g.
blazer
family and bestups
. Sources, man pages and start-up messages
of such older drivers were marked with "OBSOLETION WARNING".
do_convert_deci
flag. See
docs/man/netxml-ups.txt for details.
pkg-config
by
default (if present), rather than net-snmp-config(-32|-64)
script(s) as
the only option available previously. The scripts tend to specify a lot
of options (sometimes platform-specific) in suggested CFLAGS
and LIBS
compared to the packaged pkg-config
information which also works and is
more portable. If this change bites your distribution, please bring it up
in https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues or better yet, post a PR.
Also note that ./configure --with-netsnmp-config(=yes)
should set up the
preference of the detected script over pkg-config
information, if both
are available, and --with-netsnmp-config=/path/name
would as well.
dummy-ups can now specify mode
as a driver argument, and separates the
notion of dummy-once
(new default for \*.dev
files that do not change)
vs. dummy-loop
(legacy default for *.seq
and others) [issue #1385]
*.dev
files to work as a looping sequence with a TIMER
keywords to change
values slowly; now such files should get processed to the end once.
Specify mode=dummy-loop
driver option or rename the data file used
in the port
option for legacy behavior.
Use/Test-cases which modified such files content externally should
not be impacted.
Python: scripts have been updated to work with Python 3 as well as 2.
NUT-Monitor
script
and nut-monitor.desktop
) are still delivered, but now cover a wrapper
script which detects the environment capabilities and launches the best
suitable UI implementation (if both are available).
[D#]
prefix to log entries with level > 0
so if any scripts or other tools relied on parsing those messages
making some assumptions, they should be updated
TRACKING
ID to be used with
an INSTCMD
or SET VAR
requests; for details see docs/net-protocol.txt
and docs/sock-protocol.txt
--with-augeas-lenses-dir
configure option.
killall -SIGUSR1 upslog
to any OB/OL script actions. This will force
upslog to write a log entry to catch short power transients.
upsd
forks, to work around issues in the
NSS library.
ACCESS is no longer supported in upsd.conf. Use ACCEPT and REJECT.
Old way:
ACCESS grant all adminbox ACCESS grant all webserver ACCESS deny all all
New way:
ACCEPT adminbox ACCEPT webserver REJECT all
Note that ACCEPT and REJECT can take multiple arguments, so this will also work:
ACCEPT adminbox webserver REJECT all
This page is an attempt to document how everything came together.
The Network UPS Tools team would like to warmly thank Russell Kroll.
Russell initially started this project, maintaining and improving it for over 8 years (1996 — mid 2005).
APC’s Powerchute was running on kadets.d20.co.edu (a BSD/OS box) with
SCO binary emulation. Early test versions ran in cron, pulled status
from the log files and wrote them to a .plan file. You could see the
results by fingering pwrchute@kadets.d20.co.edu
while it lasted:
Last login Sat May 11 21:33 (MDT) on ttyp0 from intrepid.rmi.net Plan: Welcome to the UPS monitor service at kadets.d20.co.edu. The Smart-UPS attached to kadets generated a report at 14:24:01 on 05/17/96. During the measured period, the following data points were taken: Voltage ranged from 115.0 VAC to 116.3 VAC. The UPS generated 116.3 VAC at 60.00 Hz. The battery level was at 27.60 volts. The load placed on the UPS was 024.9 percent. UPS temperature was measured at 045.0 degrees Celsius. Measurements are taken every 10 minutes by the upsd daemon. This report is generated by a script written by Russell Kroll<rkroll@kadets>. Modified for compatibility with the BSD/OS cron daemon by Neil Schroeder
This same status data could also be seen with a web browser, since we had rigged up a CGI wrapper script which called finger.
Initial tests with a freestanding non-daemon program provided a few basic status registers from the UPS. The 940-0024C cable was not yet understood, so this happened over the [attachment:apcevilhack.jpg evil two-wire serial hack].
Communicating with SMART-UPS 700 S/N WS9643050926 [10/17/96] Input voltage range: 117.6 VAC - 118.9 VAC Load is 010.9% of capacity, battery is charged to 100.0% of capacity
Note that today’s apcsmart driver still displays the serial number when it starts, since it is derived from this original code.
The first split daemon/client code was written. upsd spoke directly to the UPS (APC Smart models only) and communicated with upsc by sending binary structures in UDP datagrams.
The first CGI interface existed, but it was all implemented with shell scripts. The main script would call upsc to retrieve status values. Then it would cat a template file through sed to plug them into the page.
upsstats actually has since returned to using templates, despite having a period in the middle when it used hardcoded HTML.
The images were also created with shell scripts. Each script would call upsc to get the right value (utility, upsload, battcap). It then took the value, plugged it into a command file with sed, and passed that into fly, a program which used an interpreted language to create images. fly actually uses gd, just like upsimage does today.
This code later evolved into Smart UPS Tools 0.10.
Version 0.10 was released on March 10, 1998. It used the same design as the pre-release prototype. This made expansion difficult as the binary structure used for network communications would break any time a new variable was added. Due to byte-ordering and struct alignment issues, the code usually couldn’t talk over the network to a system with a different architecture. It was also hopelessly bound to one type of UPS hardware.
Five more releases followed with this design followed. The last was 0.34, released October 27, 1998.
Following a long period of inactivity and two months of prerelease testing versions, 0.40.0 was released on June 5, 1999. It featured a complete redesign and rewrite of all of the code. The layering was now in three pieces, with the single driver (smartups) separate from the server (upsd).
Clients remained separate as before and still used UDP to talk to the server, but they now used a text-based protocol instead of the brittle binary structs. A typical request like "REQ UTILITY" would be answered with "ANS UTILITY 120.0".
The ups-trust425-625 driver appeared shortly after the release of 0.40.0, marking the first expansion beyond APC hardware.
Over the months that followed, the backupspro driver would be forked from the smartups driver to handle the APC Back-UPS Pro line. Then the backups driver was written to handle the APC Back-UPS contact-closure models. These drivers would later be renamed and recombined, with smartups and backupspro becoming apcsmart, and backups became genericups.
The drivers stored status data in an array. At first, they passed this data to upsd by saving it to a file. upsd would reread this file every few seconds to keep a copy for itself. This was later expanded to allow shared memory mode, where only a stub would remain on the disk. The drivers and server then passed data through the shared memory space.
upsd picked up the ability to monitor multiple drivers on the system, and the "upsname@hostname" scheme was born. Access controls were added, and then the network code was expanded to allow TCP communications, which at this point were on port 3305.
Several visitors to the web page and subscribers to the mailing lists provided suggestions to rename the project. The old name no longer accurately described it, and it was perilously close to APC’s "Smart-UPS" trademark. Rather than risk problems in the future, the name was changed. Kern Sibbald provided the winner: Network UPS Tools, which captures the essence of the project and makes for great short tarball filenames: nut-x.y.z.tar.gz.
The new name was first applied to 0.42.0, released October 31, 1999.
This is also when the web pages moved from the old
http://www.exploits.org/~rkroll/smartupstools/
URL to the replacement
at http://www.exploits.org/nut/
to coincide with the name change.
More drivers were written and the hardware support continued to grow. upsmon picked up the concepts of what is now known as "primary" and "secondary", and could now handle environments where multiple systems get power from a single UPS.
Manager mode was added to allow changing the value of read/write variables in certain UPS models.
Up to this point, all of the drivers compiled into freestanding programs, each providing their own implementation of main(). This meant they all had to check the incoming arguments and act uniformly. Unfortunately, not all of the programs behaved the same way, and it was hard to document and use consistently. It also meant that startup scripts had to be edited depending on what kind of hardware was attached.
Starting in 0.45.0, released June 11, 2001, there was a new common core for
all drivers called main.c
. It provided the main function and called back to
the upsdrv_*
functions provided by the hardware-specific part of the drivers.
This allowed driver authors to focus on the UPS hardware without worrying about
the housekeeping stuff that needs to happen.
This new design provided an obvious way to configure drivers from one file, and
so ups.conf
was born. This eventually spawned upsdrvctl, and now all drivers
based on this common core could be started or stopped with one command. Startup
scripts now could contain "upsdrvctl start", and it didn’t matter what kind of
hardware or how many UPSes you had on one system.
Interestingly, at the end of this month, Arnaud Quette entered the UPS world, as a subcontractor of the now defunct MGE UPS SYSTEMS. This marked the start of a future successful collaboration.
During the 0.45.x series, both the old standalone drivers and the ones which had been converted to the common core were released together. Before the release of 0.50.0 on May 24, 2002, all of the old drivers were removed. While this shrank the list of supported hardware, it set the precedent for removing code which isn’t receiving regular maintenance. The assumption is that the code will be brought back up to date by someone if they actually need it. Otherwise, it’s just dead weight in the tree.
This change meant that all remaining drivers could be controlled with the
upsdrvctl
and ups.conf
, allowing the documentation to be greatly
simplified. There was no longer any reason to say "do this, unless you
have this driver, then do this".
IANA granted an official port number to the project, and the network code
switched to port 3493. It had previously been on 3305 which is assigned to
odette-ftp
. 3305 was probably picked in 1997 because it was the fifth
project to spawn from some common UDP server code.
After 0.50.1, the 0.99 tree was created to provide a tree which would receive nothing but bug fixes in preparation for the release of 1.0. As it turned out, very few things required fixing, and there were only three releases in this tree.
After nearly 5 years of having a 0.x version number, 1.0.0 was released on August 19, 2002. This milestone meant that all of the base features that you would expect to find were intact: good hardware support, a network server with security controls, and system shutdowns that worked.
The design was showing signs of wear from the rapid expansion, but this was intentionally ignored for the moment. The focus was on getting a good version out that would provide a reasonable base while the design issues could be addressed in the future, and I’m confident that we succeeded.
One day after the release of 1.0.0, 1.1.0 started the new development tree.
During that development cycle, the CGI programs were rewritten to use template
files instead of hard-coded HTML, thus bringing back the flexibility of the
original unreleased prototype from 5 years before. The multimon
was removed
from the tree, as the new upsstats
could do both jobs by loading different
templates.
A new client library called upsclient was created, and it replaced upsfetch. This new library only supported TCP connections, and used an opaque context struct to keep state for each connection. As a result, client programs could now do things that used multiple connections without any conflicts. This was done primarily to allow OpenSSL support, but there were other benefits from the redesign.
upsd and the clients could now use OpenSSL for basic authentication and encryption, but this was not included by default. This was provided as a bonus feature for those users who cared to read about it and enable the option, as the initial setup was complex.
After the 1.1 tree was frozen and deemed complete, it became the second stable tree with the release of 1.2.0 on November 5, 2002.
Following an extended period with no development tree, 1.3.0 got things moving again on April 13, 2003. The focus of this tree was to rewrite the driver-server communication layer and replace the static naming scheme for variables and commands.
Up to this point, all variables had names like STATUS, UTILITY, and OUTVOLT. They had been created as drivers were added to the tree, and there was little consistency. For example, it probably should have been INVOLT and OUTVOLT, but there was no OUTVOLT originally, so UTILITY was all we had. This same pattern repeated with ACFREQ — is it incoming or outgoing? — and many more.
To solve this problem, all variables and commands were renamed to a hierarchical scheme that had obvious grouping. STATUS became ups.status. UTILITY turned into input.voltage, and OUTVOLT is output.voltage. ACFREQ is input.frequency, and the new output.frequency is also now supported. Every other variable or command was renamed in this fashion.
These variables had been shared between the drivers and upsd as values. That is, for each name like STATUS, there was a #define somewhere in the tree with an INFO_ prefix that gave it a number. INFO_STATUS was 0x0006, INFO_UTILITY was 0x0004, and so on, with each name having a matching number. This number was stored in an int within a structure which was part of the array that was either written to disk or shared memory.
That structure had several restrictions on expansion and was dropped as the data sharing method between the drivers and the server. It was replaced by a new system of text-based messages over Unix domain sockets. Drivers now accepted a short list of commands from upsd, and would push out updates asynchronously. upsd no longer had to poll the state files or shared memory. It could just select all of the driver and client fds and act on events.
At the same time, the network protocol on port 3493 was overhauled to take advantage of the new naming scheme. The existing "REQ STATUS@su700", "ANS STATUS@su700 OL" scheme was showing signs of age, and it really only supported the UPS name (@su700) as an afterthought. The new protocol would now use commands like GET and LIST, leading to exchanges like "GET VAR su700 ups.status" and "VAR su700 ups.status OL". These responses contain enough data to stand alone, so clients can now handle them asynchronously.
On July 25, 2003, 1.4.0 was released. It contained support for both the old "REQ" style protocol (with names like STATUS), and the new "GET" style protocol (with names like ups.status). This tree is provided to bridge the gap between all of the old releases and the upcoming 2.0.
2.0 will be released without support for the old REQ/STATUS protocol. The hope is that client authors and those who have implemented their own monitoring software will use the 1.4 cycle to change to the new protocol. The 1.4 releases contain a lot of compatibility code to make sure both work at the same time.
1.5.0 forked from 1.4.0 and was released on July 29, 2003. The first changes were to throw out anything which was providing compatibility with the older versions of the software. This means that 1.5 and the eventual 2.0 will not talk to anything older than 1.4.
This tree continues to evolve with new serial routines for the drivers which are intended to replace the aging upscommon code which dates back to the early 0.x releases. The original routines would call alarm and read in a tight loop while fetching characters. The new functions are much cleaner, and wait for data with select. This makes for much cleaner code and easier strace/ktrace logs, since the number of syscalls has been greatly reduced.
There has also been a push to make sure the data from the UPS is well-formed and is actually usable before sending updates out to upsd. This started during 1.3 as drivers were adapted to use the dstate functions and the new variable/command names. Some drivers which were not converted to the new naming scheme or didn’t do sanity checks on the incoming UPS data from the serial port were dropped from the tree.
This tree was released as 2.0.0.
The old network code spans a range from about 0.41.1 when TCP support was introduced up to the recent 1.4 series. It used variable names like STATUS, UTILITY, and LOADPCT. Many of these names go back to the earliest prototypes of this software from 1997. At that point there was no way to know that so many drivers would come along and introduce so many new variables and commands. The resulting mess grew out of control over the years.
During the 1.3 development cycle, all variables and instant commands were renamed to fit into a tree-like structure. There are major groups, like input, output and battery. Members of those groups have been arranged to make sense - input.voltage and output.voltage compliment each other. The old names were UTILITY and OUTVOLT. The benefits in this change are obvious.
The 1.4 clients can talk to either type of server, and can handle either naming scheme. 1.4 servers have a compatibility mode where they can answer queries for both names, even though the drivers are internally using the new format.
When 1.4 clients talk to 1.4 or 2.0 (or more recent) servers, they will use the new names.
Here’s a table to make it easier to visualize:
Server version | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Client version | 1.0 | 1.2 | 1.4 | 2.0+ |
1.0 | yes | yes | yes | no |
1.2 | yes | yes | yes | no |
1.4 | yes | yes | yes | yes |
2.0+ | no | no | yes | yes |
Version 2.0, and more recent, do not contain backwards compatibility for the old protocol and variable/command names. As a result, 2.0 clients can’t talk to anything older than a 1.4 server. If you ask a 2.0 client to fetch "STATUS", it will fail. You’ll have to ask for "ups.status" instead.
Authors of separate monitoring programs should have used the 1.4 series to write support for the new variables and command names. Client software can easily support both versions as long as they like. If upsd returns ERR UNKNOWN-COMMAND to a GET request, you need to use REQ.
The bandwidth demands of a project like this have slowly been forcing me to offload certain parts to other servers. The download links have pointed offsite for many months, and other large things like certain UPS protocols have followed. As the traffic grows, it’s clear that having the project attached to exploits.org is not going to work.
The solution was to register a new domain and set up mirrors. There are two
initial web servers, with more on the way. The main project URL has changed
from http://www.exploits.org/nut/
to https://www.networkupstools.org.
The actual content is hosted on various mirrors which are updated regularly
with rsync, so the days of dribbling bits through my DSL should be over.
This is also when all of the web pages were redesigned to have a simpler look with fewer links on the left side. The old web pages used to have 30 or more links on the top page, and most of them vanished when you dropped down one level. The links are now constant on the entire site, and the old links now live in their own groups in separate directories.
The year 2004 was marked by a release slowdown, since Russell was busy with personal subjects. But the patches queue was still growing quickly.
At that time, the development process was still centralized. There was no revision control system (like the current Subversion repository), nor trackers to interact with NUT development. Russell was receiving all the patches and requests, and doing all the work on his own, including releases.
Russell was more and more thinking about giving the project leadership to Arnaud Quette, which finally happened with the 2.0.1 release in February 2005.
This marked a new era for NUT…
First, Arnaud aimed at opening up the development by creating a project on the Debian Alioth Forge. This allowed to build the team of hackers that Russell dreamed about. It also allows to ensure NUT’s continuation, whatever happens to the leader. And that would most of all boost the projects contributions.