Use NUT to watch your UPS

A client of mine today wanted to be able to shut down their linux server if their UPS goes off line and reaches low battery. They currently have the CyberPower 1500 AVR UPS, which states that 2008 will have linux support. After googlin’ around a bit I came across this project, Network UPS Tools or NUT. This project rules, and they have a lot of UPS drivers available. On top of that, it’s in portage!

Basically, you can configure a machine (the master) to connect to the UPS. In this case, it needs to connect via serial cable. The master will have a ups daemon where monitoring daemons can connect to. What’s cool with this, is that other linux boxes can connect to this upsd as ‘slaves’. In my scenario I have two Gentoo boxes, a file server and firewall. I configured the daemon and monitor to exists on the fileserver as well as a monitor on the firewall. I’ll list the procedure below.

emerge -pv sys-power/nut

Configure ups.conf

[server] driver = cyberpower port = /dev/ttyS0

The driver option are the available nut drivers available. To see what driver will work for you, go here. Port can be set to auto, but I knew what serial interface is was listening on. You may need to build serial support in your kernel and enable it in your BIOS. Also, some UPS use USB, make sure you have HID support built into the kernel.

Next, configure your upsd.conf. Basically, we need to set up ACLs and we’ll be using those names in other areas..

ACL all 0.0.0.0/0 ACL localhost 127.0.0.1/32 ACL firewall 10.0.1.1/32 ACL backup1 10.0.1.20/32 ACCEPT localhost ACCEPT firewall ACCEPT fileserver REJECT all

Now, we need to create users that can connect to the monitor, we do this by editing upsd.users.

[admin] password = yourpassword actions = SET instcmds = ALL


[monuser]

        password = yourpassword

        allowfrom = localhost fileserver

        upsmon master

[monslave] password = yourpassword allowfrom = firewall upsmon slave

As you can see, we reference the names from our ACL here.

Finally, we configure the upsmon.conf. Here we will put our MONITOR statement and access. This example is for the ‘master’, bascially the machine that is directly connected to the UPS.

MINSUPPLIES 1 SHUTDOWNCMD "/sbin/shutdown -h +0" POLLFREQ 5 POLLFREQALERT 5 HOSTSYNC 15 DEADTIME 15 POWERDOWNFLAG /etc/killpower RBWARNTIME 43200 NOCOMMWARNTIME 300 FINALDELAY 5 RUN_AS_USER root MONITOR server@localhost 1 monuser yourpassword master

Make sure you start and add these services to the runlevel

/etc/init.d/upsd start /etc/init.d/upsmon start rc-update add upsd default rc-update add upsmon default

Test to make sure you can talk to the UPS.

upsc server@localhost

You should see something similar to this:

nut # upsc server@localhost battery.charge: 100 driver.name: cyberpower driver.parameter.port: /dev/ttyS0 driver.version: 2.0.5 driver.version.internal: 1.00 input.frequency: 60.0 input.voltage: 120 ups.firmware: 5.100 ups.load: 020 ups.mfr: CyberPower ups.model: Unknown model - 15 ups.status: OL ups.temperature: 44.0

To configure the ‘slave’, the firewall in my case, emerge sys-power/nut there. Only edit the upsmon.conf and add the following:

MONITOR server@10.0.1.20 1 monslave yourpassword slave

Start and add upsmon

/etc/init.d/upsmon start rc-update add upsmon default

Test from the slave

upsc server@10.0.1.20 battery.charge: 100 driver.name: cyberpower driver.parameter.port: /dev/ttyS0 driver.version: 2.0.5 driver.version.internal: 1.00 input.frequency: 60.0 input.voltage: 120 ups.firmware: 5.100 ups.load: 020 ups.mfr: CyberPower ups.model: Unknown model - 15 ups.status: OL ups.temperature: 44.0

How nut works is it waits for ON BATTERY and LOW BATTERY indications before issuing the shutdown, you can configure your BIOS to reboot when power returns. I’m still working on that issue on the boxes. You can also graph the UPS via cacti and have nut send alerts when it’s offline, etc. Overall, this is a really cool project!!!