[OmniOS-discuss] usb hid ups monitoring

Mon Jun 2 09:39:58 UTC 2014

The principal benefit of ethernet is that you avoid all the driver / port
issues (at the expense of, as Paul said, the risk that your switch goes
down before the server / UPS and you lose connectivity - if it is not on
the same UPS).

USB support can be tricky in OmniOS - it obviously doesn't support
everything and is more likely to have issues that are difficult to diagnose
/ rectify.

Serial support may be fine, but a hacked-together cable like that is
obviously not production-ready.  The UPSs come included with a cable, but
if it's been lost then a standard straight-through serial cable is not a
drop-in replacement (although they can be found on ebay easily enough).
Also, these days very few motherboards come with RS232 onboard - and USB to
serial adapters pretty much suck; there are so many that have tiny
differences in their chipsets that they frequently don't work (this is
especially troublesome on Windows but I have not tried it in OmniOS - where
support may also be limited).

On 2 June 2014 17:41, Olaf Marzocchi <lists at marzocchi.net> wrote:

> I was actually going to suggest you to try the apcupsd software if you
> have problems with the other ones.
> And also, those serial cables are extremely simple, I made one with some
> loose wires held together with sticky tape and soldered to serial plugs. I
> cannot even call it "cable".
> I am monitoring a Smart UPS 700 via serial and apcupsd and I can also
> check UPS load, temperature, ...
>
> What are the advantages of the NUT and sntp you mentioned over apcupsd?
>
> Regards,
> Olaf Marzocchi
>
>
>
> Il giorno 02/giu/2014, alle ore 06:50, Denis Cheong <
> denis at denisandyuki.net> ha scritto:
>
> Fair enough - bear in mind that the serial port on Smart UPSs require a
> special cable, they are not simple serial despite their appearance.
>
>
> On 2 June 2014 14:28, Paul B. Henson <henson at acm.org> wrote:
>
>> I actually do have a network management card in the unit, and was
>> originally thinking of monitoring via the snmp driver :). However, the ups
>> for the server is not the same ups as for the network gear, and at least
>> for now the server ups has about twice the runtime as the network ups 8-/,
>> so my connection to the ups would drop before it ran out of juice :(. I'm
>> not sure what nut would do in such a circumstance, extrapolate from the
>> last reading or consider the ups dead. It seems safer all around to just
>> have a direct connection to the ups in this case. It also has a serial
>> port, so I could try that if USB fails me, but I'd rather use USB. It's
>> trivial to get going under linux, pretty much just plug and play. It would
>> be nice to get a similar level of usability for illumos distributions. I
>> hear talk on and off of doing a rip and replace of the entire illumos USB
>> stack, that's usually in the context of adding usb3 support, I don't know
>> if that would make use cases like this easier too.
>>
>> Thanks...
>>
>> On Jun 1, 2014, at 8:42 PM, Denis Cheong <denis at denisandyuki.net> wrote:
>>
>> I am monitoring the exact same UPS on my OmniOS box, with NUT configured
>> as per the old Oracle blog - however I have it connected through a network
>> interface.
>>
>> If you have issues with connecting it via USB, I suggest you consider
>> adding a network card which is likely to be much easier to get up and
>> running.
>>
>>
>> On 2 June 2014 13:29, Paul B. Henson <henson at acm.org> wrote:
>>
>>> So I've got an older APC Smart-UPS 1500 which I'd like to monitor from
>>> omnios via usb. I plugged it into one of my linux boxes just to verify
>>> how it presented the usb interface, and NUT said:
>>>
>>> driver = "usbhid-ups"
>>>         port = "auto"
>>>         vendorid = "051D"
>>>         productid = "0002"
>>>         product = "Smart-UPS 1500 RM FW:617.3.D USB FW:1.5"
>>>         serial = "AS0411320933"
>>>         vendor = "TRIPP LITE"
>>>         bus = "002"
>>>
>>> So I believe NUT should support it with the standard hid driver. I went
>>> looking for how to setup usb ups support under omnios, and didn't find
>>> too much. Most of the results for Solaris talk about forcing the device
>>> to use the ugen driver rather than the hid driver, but I found some
>>> posts on the NUT mailing list saying that's not really needed anymore,
>>> and you should be able to monitor it as a hid device.
>>>
>>> At this point, I've got it plugged in, and it shows up as:
>>>
>>> usb3/1.2                       usb-input    connected    unconfigured ok
>>>
>>> usb3/1.2                       connected    unconfigured ok         Mfg:
>>> American Power Conversion  Product: Smart-UPS 1500 RM FW:617.3.D USB
>>> FW:1.5  NConfigs: 1  Config: 0  : 1
>>>
>>> It looks like it's connecting as a HID device, although it's showing up
>>> as unconfigured. I haven't installed NUT yet, so maybe it will be as
>>> simple as running it and the device will be automagically configured and
>>> start working ;). But while I'm spinning up NUT, I wanted to see if
>>> there was any more up to date advice on how to monitor a usb hid type
>>> ups under omnios.
>>>
>>> Thanks...
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> OmniOS-discuss mailing list
>>> OmniOS-discuss at lists.omniti.com
>>> http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/omnios-discuss
>>>
>>
>>
> _______________________________________________
> OmniOS-discuss mailing list
> OmniOS-discuss at lists.omniti.com
> http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/omnios-discuss
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OmniOS-discuss mailing list
> OmniOS-discuss at lists.omniti.com
> http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/omnios-discuss
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://omniosce.org/ml-archive/attachments/20140602/9451d8d6/attachment.html>