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

Provided by: nut-server_2.8.1-3.1ubuntu2_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).

SUPPORTED HARDWARE

       usbhid-ups brings USB/HID UPS monitoring to NUT on all platforms 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,

       •   all AMETEK Powervar UPM models,

       •   some APC models,

       •   some Belkin models,

       •   some Cyber Power Systems models,

       •   some Powercom models,

       •   some PowerWalker models,

       •   some TrippLite models.

       For a more complete list, refer to the NUT hardware compatibility list, available in the
       source distribution as data/driver.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 and illumos-based distributions.

EXTRA ARGUMENTS

This driver also supports the following optional settings:

port = string
Some value must be set, typically auto.

Note
This could be a device filesystem path like /dev/usb/hiddev0 but current use of
libusb API precludes knowing and matching by such identifiers. They may also be
inherently unreliable (dependent on re-plugging and enumeration order). At this
time the actual value is ignored, but syntactically some port configuration must
still be there.

It is possible to control multiple UPS units simultaneously by running several instances
of this driver, provided they can be uniquely distinguished by setting some combination of
the vendor, product, vendorid, productid, serial, bus and/or device options detailed
below. For devices or operating systems that do not provide sufficient information, the
allow_duplicates option can be of use (limited and risky!)

vendorid = regex, productid = regex, vendor = regex, product = regex, serial = 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) for more information on regular
expressions), which must match the UPS’s entire respective vendor/product/serial
string (minus any surrounding whitespace), or the whole 4-digit hexadecimal code for
vendorid and productid.

Try lsusb(8) or running this NUT driver with -DD command-line argument 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 buses. The argument is a regular
expression that must match the bus name where the UPS is connected (e.g. bus="002" or
bus="00[2-3]") as seen on Linux in /sys/bus/usb/devices or lsusb(8); including leading
zeroes.

device = regex
Select a UPS on a specific USB device or group of devices. The argument is a regular
expression that must match the device name where the UPS is connected (e.g.
device="001" or device="00[1-2]") as seen on Linux in /sys/bus/usb/devices or
lsusb(8); including leading zeroes.

Note
device numbers are not guaranteed by the OS to be stable across re-boots or device
re-plugging.

busport = regex
If supported by the hardware, OS and libusb on the particular deployment, this option
should allow to specify physical port numbers on an USB hub, rather than logical
device enumeration values, and in turn — this should be less volatile across reboots
or re-plugging. The value may be seen in the USB topology output of lsusb -tv on
systems with that tool, for example.

Note
this option is not practically supported by some NUT builds (it should be ignored
with a warning then), and not by all systems that NUT can run on.

allow_duplicates
If you have several UPS devices which may not be uniquely identified by the options
above (e.g. only VID:PID can be discovered there), this flag allows each driver
instance where it is set to take the first match if available, or proceed to try
another.

Normally the driver initialization would abort at this point claiming "Resource busy"
or similar error, assuming that the otherwise properly matched device is unique — and
some other process already handles it.

Warning
This feature is inherently non-deterministic! The association of driver instance
name to actual device may vary between runs!

If you only care to know that at least one of your no-name UPSes is online, this
option can help.

If you must really know which one, it will not!

usb_set_altinterface = bAlternateSetting
Force redundant call to usb_set_altinterface(), especially if needed for devices
serving multiple USB roles where the UPS is not represented by the interface number 0
(default).

subdriver=regex
Select the USB HID subdriver for the device manually, where automatic match by device
attributes alone does not suffice (e.g. new devices for which no vendorid/productid
pair was built into any driver — but common USB HID support is anticipated, or for
different-capability devices with same interface chips, notably "phoenixtec/liebert"
and "mge").

Run the driver program with the --help option to see the exact list of subdriver
values it would currently recognize.

Note
this option first checks for exact matches to subdriver identification strings,
such as "TrippLite HID 0.85" (which are prone to bit-rot), and if there was no
exact match — retries with a case-insensitive extended regular expression.

Note
When using this option, it is mandatory to also specify the vendorid and productid
matching parameters.

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.

Note that many Cyber Power Systems (CPS) models tend to divide this delay by 60 and
round down, so the minimum advisable value is 60 to avoid powering off immediately
after NUT sends the shutdown command to the UPS.

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 UPSes will restart no
matter what, even if the power is (still) out at the moment this timer elapses. In
that case, you could see whether setting ondelay = -1 in ups.conf helps.

Note that many CPS models tend to divide this delay by 60 and round down, so the
minimum advisable value is 120 to allow a short delay between when the UPS shuts down,
and when the power returns.

pollfreq=num
Set polling frequency for full updates, in seconds. Compared to the quick updates
performed every "pollinterval" (the latter option is described in ups.conf(5)), the
"pollfreq" interval is for polling the less-critical variables. The default value is
30 (in seconds).

pollonly
If this flag is set, the driver will not use Interrupt In transfers during the shorter
"pollinterval" cycles (not recommended, but needed if these reports are broken on your
UPS).

onlinedischarge
If this flag is set, the driver will treat OL+DISCHRG status as offline. For most
devices this combination means calibration or similar maintenance; however some UPS
models (e.g. CyberPower UT series) emit OL+DISCHRG when wall power is lost — and need
this option to handle shutdowns.

onlinedischarge_calibration
If this flag is set, the driver will treat OL+DISCHRG status as calibration. Some UPS
models (e.g. APC were seen to do so) report OL+DISCHRG when they are in calibration
mode. This usually happens after a few seconds reporting an OFF state as well, while
the hardware is switching to on-battery mode.

Note
If it takes so long on your device that a shutdown gets issued, you may want to
look at upsmon option OFFDURATION used to filter out temporary values of
"administrative OFF" as not a loss of a feed for the powered load.

disable_fix_report_desc
Set to disable fix-ups for broken USB encoding, etc. which we apply by default on
certain models (vendors/products) which were reported as not following the protocol
strictly. This flag allows to disable the feature in particular device configurations.

It is always possible that the vendors eventually release fixed firmware, or re-use
identifiers by which we match suspected broken devices for unrelated products, so
processing these fix-ups would be a waste of time there.

It is also always possible that NUT fix-ups cause issues on some devices, whether due
to NUT bugs or because the vendor protocol implementation is broken in more than one
place.

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.

waitbeforereconnect=num
The driver automatically tries to reconnect to the UPS on unexpected error. This
parameter (in seconds) allows it to wait before attempting the reconnection. The
default value is 0.

Note
for instance, it was found that Eaton MGE Ellipse Max 1500 FR UPS firmware stops
responding every few hours, which causes usbhid-ups driver to detect an libusb
insufficient memory error; in this case, when the usbhid-ups driver tries to
reconnect too early, the activity sometimes led the UPS firmware to crash and turn
off the load immediately! Setting this parameter to 30 seconds solved this problem
(while 20 seconds were not enough).

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.

IMPLEMENTATION

Selecting a specific UPS
As mentioned above, 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
device-matching options. For instance:

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

USB Polling and Interrupt Transfers
The usbhid-ups driver has two polling intervals. The "pollinterval" configuration option
controls what can be considered the "inner loop", where the driver polls and waits briefly
for "interrupt" reports. The "pollfreq" option is for less frequent updates of a larger
set of values, and as such, we recommend setting that interval to several times the value
of "pollinterval".

Many UPSes will respond to a USB Interrupt In transfer with HID reports corresponding to
values which have changed. This saves the driver from having to poll each value
individually with USB Control transfers. Since the OB and LB status flags are important
for a clean shutdown, the driver also explicitly polls the HID paths corresponding to
those status bits during the inner "pollinterval" time period. The "pollonly" option can
be used to skip the Interrupt In transfers if they are known not to work.

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 (such
as 10 seconds). This should solve the issue.

Note that if you increase "pollinterval" beyond 10 or 15 seconds, you might also want to
increase "pollfreq" by the same factor.

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.

UPS cuts power too soon
Note that many Cyber Power Systems (CPS) models tend to divide offdelay by 60 and round
down, so the minimum advisable value is 60 (seconds) to avoid powering off immediately
after NUT sends the shutdown command to the UPS.

UPS does not set battery.charge.low but says OK
Note that many Cyber Power Systems (CPS) models tend to allow only certain values for
battery.charge.low and anything outside of the set of allowed values are rounded or
ignored.

A shell loop like this can help you map out the allowed values:

for i in `seq 90 -1 0`; do echo "set to $i"; \
upsrw -s battery.charge.low=$i -u * -p * cps-big; \
sleep 1; upsc cps-big battery.charge.low; echo ""; \
done

For example, for CPS PR1000LCDRTXL2U model, the only allowed values are
[60,55,50,45,40,35,30,25,20] and in some cases, your UPS may effectively not support a
value of 10 for the battery.charge.low setting.

HISTORY

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

AUTHORS

       Originally sponsored by MGE UPS SYSTEMS.

       Now sponsored by Eaton http://opensource.eaton.com

       •   Arnaud Quette

       •   Peter Selinger

       •   Arjen de Korte