@zkab said in Manage two UPS:

My setup looks like this:

Powered by APC UPS 1:

pfSense (Protectli computer)
Synology NAS 1
Synology NAS 2
Fedora computers
Rasperi Pi (Home Assistant)
UnifiCloudKeyGen2Plus (Unifi WiFi)

Powered by APC UPS 2:

Fedora computers

As a general rule, you want to choose a NUT primary based on speed of shutdown, availability and reliability. Systems slower to shutdown, such as Synology, should always be secondaries where possible.

For UPS 1, pfSense or the Pi would be the best choice for primary, with the rest as secondaries.

You should not use pfSense to manage UPS 2. Use one of the systems attached to the UPS as the primary, and have the others as clients. If there is one system that shuts down substantially quicker than the others, choose that as the primary.

Alternatively, since you have SNMP you can also have each host running as a NUT primary speaking directly to the corresponding UPS. If you do this, don't give any of the hosts write access to the UPS, and make sure to configure the UPS itself to have adequate time between declaring low battery, and mains cut off.

@firefox Glad you got it working

@netboy Glad you got it sorted.

@jrey: Very helpful! Thank you very much!

Note that these are two quite different questions:

Once the UPS declares a low battery, does the UPS have enough battery remaining to cover the time required for the NUT primary, and potentially secondaries, to complete their shutdowns? This is potentially several minutes.

After being instructed to cut the power by the NUT primary, does the UPS wait long enough for the NUT primary, and potentially secondaries, to complete their shutdowns before turning off the power? This is usually 20-60 seconds.

@incith The next release is expected switch over to the 2.8.2 production release of NUT.

@DominikHoffmann
Actually, the key is to read config documentation of the NMC. As mentioned above, in your NMC web gui you need to go to Configuration>Shutdown and select which user will be used on pfsense to establish connectivity. Then, you need to setup the passphrase, which is different from the password you set for that particular user in NMC. Make sure the passphrase is at least 15 characters long as mentioned in config doc. Then you go back to APCUPSD in pfsense and select pcnet driver and then under device ipadd:(user selected in above step):(auth passphrase chosen in above step) You don't have to specify default port unless you have changed that.
BTW, this worked on APC NMC2 card with firmware 07.1(ID17). This is the one labeled with SchneiderElectric instead of APC and mine is from 2016/2015.
Good Luck

@chewie said in Would ignorelb work on socomec double on-line conversion UPS:

@dennypage I apologize, this is what i did...

upsrw -s ups.delay.shutdown =120

and immediately the delay shutdown was set to 120 without me restarting nut with the circular arrow on the top right corner of pfsense. But the moment i hit that arrow the delay shutdown goes back to its original value of 30. Rebooting pfsense would still show the value at 30.

Apologies for the delay, I've been busy/offline.

So I expect what is happening is that the NUT driver is resetting the shutdown delay on start, even though you have not specified a value. Lots of little quirks like this in NUT drivers.

So yes, I would recommend setting the offdelay parameter in the Extra Arguments to driver section. You can confirm that it is correctly setting the value in the UPS by using the upsrw command to read from the UPS after restarting NUT.

Just to add that I was able to set the following settings in this APC, by:

Extra Arguments to driver (optional):

offdelay=60 ondelay=180 waitbeforereconnect=30

Note: waitbeforereconnect=30 is important since the driver sometimes loses connectivity with NUT.

Additional configuration lines for ups.conf

maxretry=3 retrydelay=10

Shell:

Check the admin password: (You don't need to set an admin user in upsd.users file), the password changes, so you need to check every time you are going to make a change.

cat /usr/local/etc/nut/upsd.users

Checking defaults:

upsrw -l ups

Changing values:

upsrw -s battery.charge.low ups Username (root): admin Password: Enter new value for battery.charge.low: 50 OK upsrw -s battery.runtime.low ups Username (root): admin Password: Enter new value for battery.runtime.low: 1500 OK

If you receive the following error after boot, with or without user=root in ups.conf :
UPS [ups]: connect failed: Connection failure: Connection refused

Then, install shellcmd and use the following script as shellcmd:

#!/bin/sh sleep 60 /usr/local/sbin/pfSsh.php playback svc stop nut sleep 20 /usr/local/sbin/pfSsh.php playback svc start nut sleep 5 exit 1 done

@beardedguy You are welcome.

@stompro Fair enough. I'm actually the pfSense NUT maintainer, but I do understand your caution. If you want to wait for official builds that's totally understandable.

Regarding the size, yes, the executable I posted has debug symbols, whereas the production one does not. Unfortunately the standard development tools are not present on pfSense so you cannot run the strip and size commands.

Screenshot 2024-07-10 at 09.46.53.png

FWIW, the sha256sum on the executable as posted is

d4e4563ca03ed92ef780c0799cd1e29c3d53638d738fb74e47b196c8540d44cf

If you want to build it yourself, you will need to set up a FreeBSD 14 system and then install the FreeBSD ports package to do the build from.

@MaxK-0

You may be right, but I've seen many examples of how Li-ion and LiFePO4 batteries catch fire. This can happen despite all the protection classes. The fire protection class is just the time before the fire starts to spread; it doesn't mean they don't burn at all. Yes, maybe 99.9% of them are safe... I don't know, it's just my personal paranoia.

As for lead acid batteries, I don't know what you have to do to set them on fire. I've only seen cases online involving hydrogen emission and subsequent explosion, more like a pop, that blew the lid off. But these were car batteries with open caps for topping up, and there was always an ignition source nearby when it happened. I've never heard of regular UPS sealed batteries catching fire or exploding. They can crack and melt, but not burn. That's why no one takes such safety measures as it usually takes for Li-ion chemistry. Of course, I'm not talking about cases where fires occur due to related factors, such as charger fires and the like.

I am also speaking solely for myself, I am not a fan of any particular company, can't say that everything is perfect with any specific one... Our world is imperfect, unfortunately.

@dennypage Thanks for the reply and associated info. Working on assimilating it. Help much appreciated.

@Laxarus said in SNMP UPS question:

My NUT clients are not configured to send commands to UPS to shut it down. I configure the UPS shutdown sequence in the UPS config itself and it is shutting its outputs and at last itself in the correct order.

I am curious though, why would you want to send a shutdown command to UPS itself from the clients? Does it not have a proper configuration to manage that?

"Client" is ambiguous. Did you mean NUT client, or UPS (SNMP) client? Only one SNMP entity should be configured to instruct the UPS to shut down. The other hosts would be set up as NUT clients of the main NUT server.

As to why you would want to send a shutdown command, this is because most UPSs do not actually shut down on their own, and NUT is dependent upon the power actually being cut.

I haven't tested NMC3 behavior in that regard, so I cannot make a dfinitive statement.

@dennypage Thank you for your help

@dennypage Thanks for checking. I appreciate all the support you have given. Look forward to the new and improved NUT.

@diegus83 Strange that it would show up in upsrw, but not allow change. Is it SNMP perhaps?