Ubuntu Manpage: usbhid-ups - Driver for USB/HID UPS equipment

Provided by: nut-server_2.7.4-5.1ubuntu2_amd64

NAME

       usbhid-ups - Driver for USB/HID UPS equipment

NOTE

       This man page only documents the hardware-specific features of the usbhid-ups driver. For information
       about the core driver, see nutupsdrv(8).

       This driver, formerly called newhidups, replaces the legacy hidups driver, which only supported Linux
       systems.

SUPPORTED HARDWARE

       usbhid-ups brings USB/HID UPS monitoring to NUT on all platform supporting USB through libusb. It should
       detect any UPS that uses the HID power device class, but the amount of data will vary depending on the
       manufacturer and model.

       At the present time, usbhid-ups supports:

       •   the newer Eaton USB models,

       •   all MGE USB models,

       •   all Dell USB models,

       •   some APC models,

       •   some Belkin models,

       •   some Cyber Power Systems models,

       •   some Powercom models,

       •   some TrippLite models.

       For a more complete list, refer to the NUT hardware compatibility list, available in the source
       distribution as data/drivers.list, or on the NUT website. You may use the "explore" driver option to
       gather information from HID UPSes which are not yet supported; see below for details.

       This driver is known to work on:

       •   most Linux systems,

       •   FreeBSD (beta stage) and maybe other *BSD,

       •   Darwin / Mac OS X,

       •   Solaris 10.

EXTRA ARGUMENTS

This driver also supports the following optional settings:

offdelay=num
Set the timer before the UPS is turned off after the kill power command is sent (via the -k switch).

The default value is 20 (in seconds). Usually this must be lower than ondelay, but the driver will
not warn you upon startup if it isn’t.

ondelay=num
Set the timer for the UPS to switch on in case the power returns after the kill power command had
been sent but before the actual switch off. This ensures the machines connected to the UPS are, in
all cases, rebooted after a power failure.

The default value is 30 (in seconds). Usually this must be greater than offdelay, but the driver will
not warn you upon startup if it isn’t. Some UPS’es will restart no matter what, even if the power is
(still) out at the moment this timer elapses. In that case, you could try if setting ondelay = -1 in
ups.conf helps.

pollfreq=num
Set polling frequency, in seconds, to reduce the USB data flow. Between two polling requests, the
driver will wait for interrupts (aka UPS notifications), which are data changes returned by the UPS
by itself. This mechanism allow to avoid or reduce staleness message, due to the UPS being
temporarily overloaded with too much polling requests. The default value is 30 (in seconds).

pollonly
If this flag is set, the driver will ignore interrupts it receives from the UPS (not recommended, but
needed if these reports are broken on your UPS).

vendor=regex, product=regex, serial=regex, vendorid=regex, productid=regex
Select a specific UPS, in case there is more than one connected via USB Each option specifies an
extended regular expression (see regex(7)) that must match the UPS’s entire vendor/product/serial
string (minus any surrounding whitespace), or the whole 4-digit hexadecimal code for vendorid and
productid. Try -DD for finding out the strings to match.

Examples:

• -x vendor="Foo.Corporation.*"

• -x vendorid=051d* (APC)

• -x product=".*(Smart|Back)-?UPS.*"

bus=regex
Select a UPS on a specific USB bus or group of busses. The argument is a regular expression that must
match the bus name where the UPS is connected (e.g. bus="002", bus="00[2-3]").

explore
With this option, the driver will connect to any device, including ones that are not yet supported.
This must always be combined with the "vendorid" option. In this mode, the driver will not do
anything useful except for printing debugging information (typically used with -DD).

maxreport
With this option, the driver activates a tweak to workaround buggy firmware returning invalid HID
report length. Some APC Back-UPS units are known to have this bug.

interruptonly
If this flag is set, the driver will not poll UPS. This also implies using of INPUT flagged objects.
Some Powercom units need this option.

interruptsize=num
Limit the number of bytes to read from interrupt pipe. For some Powercom units this option should be
equal to 8.

INSTALLATION

       This driver is not built by default. You can build it by using "configure --with-usb=yes". Note that it
       will also install other USB drivers.

       You also need to install manually the legacy hotplug files (libhidups and libhid.usermap, generally in
       /etc/hotplug/usb/), or the udev file (nut-usbups.rules, generally in /etc/udev/rules.d/) to address the
       permission settings problem. For more information, refer to the README file in nut/scripts/hotplug or
       nut/scripts/udev.

       On Linux with MGE equipment, you will need at least a 2.4.25 or 2.6.2 kernel as well as libusb-0.1.8 or
       later to disable hiddev support and avoid conflict.

IMPLEMENTATION

       The driver ignores the "port" value in ups.conf. Unlike previous versions of this driver, it is now
       possible to control multiple UPS units simultaneously with this driver, provided they can be
       distinguished by setting some combination of the "vendor", "product", "serial", "vendorid", and
       "productid" options. For instance:

           [mge]
                   driver = usbhid-ups
                   port = auto
                   vendorid = 0463
           [tripplite]
                   driver = usbhid-ups
                   port = auto
                   vendorid = 09ae

KNOWN ISSUES AND BUGS

Repetitive timeout and staleness
Some models tends to be unresponsive with the default polling frequency. The result is that your system
log will have lots of messages like:

usb 2-1: control timeout on ep0in
usb 2-1: usbfs: USBDEVFS_CONTROL failed cmd usbhid-ups rqt 128 rq 6 len 256
ret -110

In this case, simply modify the general parameter "pollinterval" to a higher value (like 10 for 10
seconds). This should solve the issue.

Got EPERM: Operation not permitted upon driver startup
You have forgotten to install the hotplug files, as explained in the INSTALLATION section above. Don’t
forget to restart hotplug so that it applies these changes.

Unattended shutdowns
The hardware which was used for development of this driver is almost certainly different from what you
have, and not all manufacturers follow the USB HID Power Device Class specifications to the letter. You
don’t want to find out that yours has issues here when a power failure hits your server room and you’re
not around to manually restart your servers.

If you rely on the UPS to shutdown your systems in case of mains failure and to restart them when the
power returns, you must test this. You can do so by running upsmon -c fsd. With the mains present, this
should bring your systems down and then cycle the power to restart them again. If you do the same without
mains present, it should do the same, but in this case, the outputs shall remain off until mains power is
applied again.

AUTHORS

       Originally sponsored by MGE UPS SYSTEMS. Now sponsored by Eaton http://opensource.eaton.com Arnaud
       Quette, Peter Selinger, Arjen de Korte