How I installed Eaton Power Protector on my NASes

I had some issues with NUT (what Netgear uses in the OS to monitor your UPS) properly communicating between the master NAS with my Eaton 5P attached via USB and my other NASes.  While that did eventually work its way out (never figured out why), it got me thinking about installing Eaton's Intellegent Power Protecor (IPP) on the NASes.  IPP, after all, gives a whole lot more information and control than NUT.  The disadvantage is that the Netgear GUI and ReadyCloud have no knowlege of it, you have to access it separately.  If I knew how to do it, I'd consider making a ReadyNAS app for it.  But I've seen no "ReadyNAS Apps for Dummies" discussion.

 

This method should also work well if your NAS and a PC share an UPS.  Just make whichever stays on all the time the master.  I'll leave setting up IPP on the PC to Eaton's instructions.

 

So, while I called myself a "dummy" above, I do have some basic Linux user skills, just not developer skills.  I'll try to drop to the lowest level for anyone I think should try this.  If you don't understand, this posting is not for you.  I'm going to describe the process, then list the specific commands.

 

I downloaded the IPP .deb package (only available for Intel systems) from Eaton and put it in my Downloads/ReadyNAS directory.  Then, from an SSH shell, I installed the package with apt-get (rather than dpkg) to insure all dependancies were met.  It installed and started up just fine.  So, I accessed IPP from my PC at ip.of.the.nas:4679 and followed the standard IPP manual.  Autodetect found the UPS, but setting it up as the power source got an error.  It turns out, you have to turn off NUT (UPS monitoring) in the GUI.  Once I did that, it worked just fine.  I guess the protocol doesn't work well with two processes addressing it simultaneously.

 

It installed in /usr/local/Eaton, which is on the OS partition, so I knew I'd want to move it to /apps once it was working.  So having completed the set-up, I copied the contents from /usr/local/Eaton to /apps/Eaton, renamed /usr/local/Eaton, and then created a symbolic link to /apps/Eaton as /usr/local/Eaton, and re-booted.  It all still worked, so I deleted the renamed installation folder.

 

Once I had IPP running on the master NAS, I installed it on the others and set them up to use the master as the power source (see IPP manual for that).  I did have an issue with IPP wanting to try and access the master NAS via the internet instead of just locally, and solved that by putting the IP address of the master in the /etc/hosts file.  Hopefully, this was something unique to me, but be aware you may need to do it.  Instructions for editing the hosts file are not included below -- Google is you friend.

 

So, here is the step-by step

 

• Download IPP from Eaton and put it in a directory of choice (example uses Download/ReadyNAS and assumes your volume is data).
• Access nas via SSH.
• apt-get  install  /data/Download/ReadyNAS/ipp-linux_1.61.158-1_amd64.deb (substitue your volume name, directory, and version number downloaded, if needed.)
• In your web browser, access the IPP GUI at ip.of.your.nas:4679 (using the actual IP address, of course) and follow Eaton's IPP manual to set everything up.  Test the shut-down, too.  Reboot NAS and make sure it all still works (except you shouldn't need to re-test shut-down).
• Back at the SSH session:  cp  -r  /usr/local/Eaton  /apps
• mv  /usr/Eaton  /usr/Eaton_old
• ln  -s  /apps/Eaton  /usr/local/Eaton
• Reboot again and make sure it's still working via the IPP GUI (just a page refesh should suffice).
• rm -r /usr/local/Eaton_old  (Be very carful with this one, if you delete the wrong stuff, there is no going back.)

This has worked for me with an RB516 as the master and RN4200V2 running OS6 and Pro2 running OS6 as "slaves".  I hope you have as much success.