Config Fun

Finally I have managed to set up a monitoring of two PowerWare 9120 USPes with NUT (Network UPS Tools). The point is that the standard software which comes with this UPS sucks in all ways and I needed something to take data from UPSes and then pass it to Nagios. So here is how we go about it:

1. Install nut and (if you are going to read data about UPS from same machine, nut-client)

yum install nut nut-client

2. Connect UPS(es) with serial cables (I assume there is not optional networking module installed on UPSes)

3. Add your UPSes to /etc/ups/ups.conf file as follows:

[ups1]
driver = upscode2
port = /dev/ttyS0
baudrate = 9600
manufacturer = PowerWare
desc = "UPS 1"

4. Modify /etc/sysconfig/ups to contain these two lines

SERVER=yes
MODEL=upsdrvctl

5. If you don’t want upsmon to act in any ways corresponding to your UPS(es) state, disable it by putting the next line in /etc/ups/upsmon.conf (otherwise edit it as described in it)

MINSUPPLIES 0

6. Enable upsd to start automatically

chkconfig --level 2345 ups on

7. Start the service

service ups on

8. Check it up

upsc ups1@localhost

That’s it. Now you can get the data anytime with upsc command as in step 8.

Few days ago I had that nice experience setting up a server on (already installed not by me) Fedora 7. Among other things, this server should be a gateway for LAN running DHCPd, DNS, iptables and all those other services for service the LAN. One thing was just driving me crazy: I had static IP for LAN ethernet, but each time I was restarting either network service or dhcp, that ethernet was getting an IP from local dhcp (that sux). I checked almost everything to make sure I specified that the ethernet should use statically assigned IP and still had no luck.

After fighting for some time I found our that NetworkManager was running and watching all those network changes. Each time I was restarting network or dhcp, NetworkManager was ignoring all the bloody settings and just trying to find best solution for me screwing everything up