On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, B. James Phillippe wrote:

> Hello NetBSD Folk,
>
> I have a TrippLite OmniSmart 700 UPS with (pseudo) serial port for
> notification of powerfail/etc.  It came with a CD containing various OS
> drivers, including several esoteric UNIX drivers.  I would like to
> connect this UPS to a NetBSD/Alpha system and am wondering if anyone has
> accomplished this - using either TrippLite drivers or OpenSource ones.
> If I could obtain documentation on the interface, I would be more than
> happy to write a driver if one does not exist.

Hello to everyone that responded,

Several folks pointed out the existance of the "nut" package.  I downloaded
this package and found that it is a very complete and rich-featured suite
of utilities that supports my UPS and most others.  The only down-side is
that this package is so feature-rich that it took hours of reading
documentation and fiddling with scripts and config files to get it working.
Also, the package is GPL, which may or may not be a problem for some
people. 8-)

In any case, I never actually got this up and running because I didn't have
the time to read all the docs.  Also, I was a little reluctant to go
through all the steps of adding user account, access control and several
separate utilities just to shut down my UPS when the battery was low. :-)

Instead I wrote a much smaller, simpler, single-app utility which seems to
do all the basic things I need: report whether running on AC or battery,
report when the battery is low, and shut off the UPS.  Power fail and low
battery events can launch an external script or program.  The down-sides
are that it only supports Tripp-Lite-like UPS' and has none of the cool
features that "nut" has.  Nonetheless, I'm going to stick with my custom
daemon because it's easier to use.  Plus, it is licensed compatible with
the BSD license. :-)

If anyone is interested in testing this program using a Tripp-Lite UPS,
please let me know.

cheers,
-bp
--
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