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Forum Discussion
How to configure UPS with PC and 3 NAS boxes
Purchased Cyberpower 1500PFCLCD, which is protecting a Windows 10 PC, RN528X, RN212, RN314, and XS716E switch. All are co-located and all are ETH connected to the XS716E. Goal: in a power outage, 3...
Understood re: switch and PC shutting down with UPS. Question was whether you applied any special settings to the UPS other than through its front panel, e.g., shutdown with X% remaining, auto-turn on after power is restored, etc. Minor stuff in the grand scheme.
Got WinNut to work, had to edit just one line in the config file:
MONITOR ups@192.168.1.210 1 monuser pass slave
The "1" and "slave" aren't mentioned in the config file comments, your link helped me as a user at the end commented that these need to be added. Once I did that, worked fine.
Final question I think: now that everything is connected and working, I'm back to configuring the shutdown process. From what I can gather, there is literally only one setting available, as shown below on the Master NAS (RN518X), which I guess is acting as the SNMP server. Under UPS Settings, there is only a % threshold I can set... this is a bit goofy, since everyone on these threads talks about shutdown commands in terms of minutes, not % of UPS battery remaining (I'm guessing that's what this % means).
So if I want to avoid shutting down too often (in case of few-minute type outages), but also don't want to let the UPS get scary low before telling the NAS's to shut down, what's the best compromise % to select here? Right now with everything running the UPS front panel is estimating I have 23-25 minutes run time. So if I chose 50% for example, I assume that means on average the NAS will wait about 12 minutes or so before telling everything to shut down. Am I understanding this correctly?
jimk1963 wrote:
Got WinNut to work, had to edit just one line in the config file:
MONITOR ups@192.168.1.210 1 monuser pass slave
The "1" and "slave" aren't mentioned in the config file comments, your link helped me as a user at the end commented that these need to be added. Once I did that, worked fine.
Per the documentation ( https://networkupstools.org/docs/man/upsmon.conf.html ), the syntax for the monitor command is MONITOR system powervalue username password type
- powervalue is 1 because there is only one power supply being fed from the UPS in the PC.
- type is slave because the monitoring is remote.
jimk1963 wrote:
Understood re: switch and PC shutting down with UPS. Question was whether you applied any special settings to the UPS other than through its front panel, e.g., shutdown with X% remaining, auto-turn on after power is restored, etc. Minor stuff in the grand scheme.
...
So if I want to avoid shutting down too often (in case of few-minute type outages), but also don't want to let the UPS get scary low before telling the NAS's to shut down, what's the best compromise % to select here?
Ok. No, I haven't used any special settings.
As far as shutdown is concerned, I just use auto. I believe that will shut down when NUT determines the UPS is in the LOWBATT state. I'm not seeing any clear indication on when that happens with CyberPower, but where it is documented (for other UPS models) it appears to be 30%.
More importantly for me is that my NAS have always shutdown cleanly with this setting, and they don't shut down too aggressively either.
jimk1963 wrote:
Right now with everything running the UPS front panel is estimating I have 23-25 minutes run time. So if I chose 50% for example, I assume that means on average the NAS will wait about 12 minutes or so before telling everything to shut down. Am I understanding this correctly?
That is the basic idea. NUTS goes back a long way (back to the 90s), and it is a bit of a "jack of all trades" package. The reporting from each UPS model needs to be adapted into its framework. In many cases this was done w/o vendor support.
You'd need to analyze the code for the specific UPS subdrivers in order to figure out whether it is using runtime or remaining charge (or both) do determine the shutdown.
Also keep in mind that the front panel report is also just an estimate. The discharge curve varies from battery to battery, depends on the overall load, and also changes as the battery ages. The UPS is also using a simple model of the battery to estimate the remaining run time.
Thanks StephenB and Sandshark , Cyberpower UPS is now configured to manage 3 NAS + 1 PC + 1 switch.
Re: NUT config file documentation, I was referring to the actual comment lines and sample code in the config file itself. Those comments/samples do not mention the "1" nor the "slave" entries at all. I didn't think to look at additional documentation since the pseudo-code was right there in the config file.
To Sandshark 's comments regarding the entry
MONITOR ups@192.168.1.210 1 monuser pass slave
I was a little confused by his statement that the password looked incorrect. The password "pass" is right there in the entry after monuser, as it should be. The command worked immediately, whereas leaving off the "1" and the "slave" returned an error. Looking at the NUT logs, I can see it's all good.
Also re: Sandshark 's comments regarding NUT conflicts as it fights with the NAS for control, that's very helpful to know. I have rebooted the PC and NAS to check for any issue, but I'm not seeing anything obvious. The NAS happily reports the UPS in its list, just as before, with all the same settings. The other 2 NAS boxes report the UPS in their lists too. And the PC auto-started the "Start WinNUT UPS Monitor" app (I added it to the PC start-up folder), so I guess it's happy. If I do have a conflict like he described, maybe I'm not just adept at seeing it. Anyway that was good input, I'll poke around and eventually, run a test to see if it all works OK. Gulp.
Thanks for all the help!
The conflict I spoke of only occurs if you are trying to run both CyberPower's utility and NUT, at least on the NAS. The problem is, I have found no way to permanently disable NUT, it auto-senses and re-configures on boot.
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