I need support for APC SNMP in NUT

fribert · Mar 17, 2008, 10:44 PM

I can see there has been a couple of posts, but I'm a bit confused on when this will be supported.
I have a SmartUPS 1000 with a SNMP card in it.
I know I can connect it with a serial cable, but as I have a coupled of units running of this UPS, and I only have one serial port in it, the SNMP is needed.

Is it consideret for 1.3? Sooner? Can I do something (simple) myself to make it work?

Best regards

rsw686 · Mar 18, 2008, 4:09 AM

NUT only has experimental support for SNMP.

"This driver has been tagged experimental, even if it has been reported to be stable. Thus it is not suitable for production systems and it is not built by default. This is mainly due to the fact that there is still no proper upsdrv_shutdown() function implemented !"

Cry Havok · Mar 18, 2008, 9:16 AM

If you want new features/support in NUT then you're best off taking this discussion to the folks responsible for NUT:

http://www.networkupstools.org/lists/

David_W · May 7, 2008, 3:30 PM

I'm wondering about following the alternative approach - of making an apcupsd package for pfSense, with SNMP support included. My new pfSense box will be going in a rack powered by a 2U 3000VA SmartUPS with an AP9619 card fitted.

apcupsd works fine for me on 'vanilla' FreeBSD using SNMP (all my SmartUPSes have management cards). There is a dependency on net-snmp when you select the SNMP option, also for correct operation, you really need to tie up the snmp trap port (UDP 162) on the interface that faces the UPS.

rsw686 · May 7, 2008, 4:26 PM

David_W, install the NUT pfSense package. Then uninstall the FreeBSD package which will leave the pfSense GUI files in place. You can then install NUT just like you would on a FreeBSD box adding in the SNMP support. Just remember this is not supported.

fribert · May 25, 2008, 11:05 AM

@David_W:

making an apcupsd package for pfSense

Any progress on this interesting quest?

David_W · May 25, 2008, 8:46 PM

I am still looking into making an apcupsd package for pfSense. Unfortunately I'm very busy at the moment, including with a couple of other tasks in my software development pipeline that really need doing before this one.

The FreeBSD side of this holds no fears - I'm used to administering FreeBSD machines, and I'm very familiar with the FreeBSD ports and packages system (I maintain several FreeBSD ports). However, I'm not very familiar with the pfSense package system yet - I need some time to familiarise myself with it.

For now, my pfSense machine is running from a LiveCD with the configuration on a USB memory key. A power failure is unlikely to damage such a system, even though there's no way for it to interact with the UPS. At least deploying the new hardware put my production pfSense system on its permanent hardware platform and I could retire the horrid Cyrix 333MHz PC I threw together from junk box parts when the Ethernet switch in my old router failed in December.

I want to move pfSense onto the new machine's hard disks so that I can install packages. That is blocking on two things - I need a UPS monitoring solution I'm happy with, also I need to decide if I'm going to install a RAID controller so that I can use two hard disks in RAID 1 for added robustness (as it stands, the machine has two identical hard disks but no RAID controller). I have the pfSense developer ISO running under VMware Workstation 6 on a Windows machine, so I have a platform to experiment on before deploying my eventual solution to my production firewall.

I will update this thread if I have anything to share. If I do develop an apcupsd package, it will be contributed to the pfSense project.