NAME

richcomm_usb - Driver UPS equipment using Richcomm dry-contact to USB solution

SYNOPSIS

richcomm_usb -h

richcomm_usb -a UPS_NAME [OPTIONS]

Note
 This man page only documents the specific features of the richcomm_usb driver. For information about the core driver, see nutupsdrv(8).

SUPPORTED HARDWARE

The Richcomm dry-contact to USB solution is a generic interface that is used to upgrade an existing (RS-232) contact closure UPS interface to USB. As such, all the limitations of the underlying contact closure interface apply. This means that you will only get the essentials in ups.status: OL, OB, and LB. See also genericups(8).

EXTRA ARGUMENTS

port = string

Required option for all NUT drivers. Some value must be set, typically auto for drivers that handle USB connections.

Note
 This could be a device filesystem path like /dev/usb/hiddev0 but current use of libusb API precludes knowing and matching by such identifiers. They may also be inherently unreliable (dependent on re-plugging and enumeration order). At this time the actual value is ignored, but syntactically some port configuration must still be there.

It is possible to control multiple UPS units simultaneously by running several instances of this driver, provided they can be uniquely distinguished by setting some combination of the vendor, product, vendorid, productid, serial, bus and/or device options detailed below. For devices or operating systems that do not provide sufficient information, the allow_duplicates option can be of use (limited and risky!)

vendorid = regex
productid = regex
vendor = regex
product = regex
serial = regex

Select a specific UPS, in case there is more than one connected via USB. Each option specifies an extended regular expression (see regex(7) for more information on regular expressions), which must match the UPS’s entire respective vendor/product/serial string values (minus any surrounding whitespace), or the whole 4-digit hexadecimal code for vendorid and productid.

Try lsusb(8) or running this NUT driver with -DD command-line argument for finding out the strings to match.

Examples:

  • -x vendor="Foo.Corporation.*"

  • -x vendorid="051d*" (APC)

  • -x product=".*(Smart|Back)-?UPS.*"

bus = regex

OPTIONAL, NOT RECOMMENDED.

Select a UPS on a specific USB bus or group of buses. The argument is a regular expression that must match the bus name where the UPS is connected (e.g. bus="002" or bus="00[2-3]") as seen on Linux in /sys/bus/usb/devices or lsusb(8); including leading zeroes.

Note
 Bus numbers are not guaranteed by the OS to be stable across re-boots, kernel driver reloads or device re-plugging (e.g. changing visible population of USB hubs).
device = regex

OPTIONAL, NOT RECOMMENDED.

Select a UPS on a specific USB device or group of devices. The argument is a regular expression that must match the device name where the UPS is connected (e.g. device="001" or device="00[1-2]") as seen on Linux in /sys/bus/usb/devices or lsusb(8); including leading zeroes.

Note
 Device numbers are not guaranteed by the OS to be stable across re-boots or device re-plugging.
busport = regex

OPTIONAL, NOT RECOMMENDED.

If supported by the hardware, OS and libusb on the particular deployment, this option should allow to specify physical port numbers on an USB hub, rather than logical device enumeration values, and in turn — this should be less volatile across reboots or re-plugging. The value may be seen in the USB topology output of lsusb -tv on systems with that tool, for example.

Note
 This option is not practically supported by some NUT builds (it should be ignored with a warning then), and not by all systems that NUT can run on.
allow_duplicates

OPTIONAL, NOT RECOMMENDED.

If you have several UPS devices which may not be uniquely identified by the options above (e.g. only VID:PID can be discovered there), this flag allows each driver instance where it is set to take the first match if available, or proceed to try another.

Normally the driver initialization would abort at this point claiming "Resource busy" or similar error, assuming that the otherwise properly matched device is unique — and some other process already handles it.

Warning

This feature is inherently non-deterministic! The association of driver instance name to actual device may vary between runs!

If you only care to know that at least one of your no-name UPSes is online, this option can help.

If you must really know which one, it will not!
usb_set_altinterface = bAlternateSetting

Force redundant call to usb_set_altinterface(), especially if needed for devices serving multiple USB roles where the UPS is not represented by the interface number 0 (default).

usb_config_index
usb_hid_rep_index
usb_hid_desc_index
usb_hid_ep_in
usb_hid_ep_out

Force use of specific interface, endpoint, descriptor index etc. numbers, rather than defaulting to 0 (rarely other values in certain drivers for some devices known to use non-zero numbers). Specified as a hexadecimal number.

As a rule of thumb for usb_hid_desc_index discovery, you can see larger wDescriptorLength values (roughly 600+ bytes) in reports of lsusb or similar tools.

LIBUSB_DEBUG = INTEGER

Run-time troubleshooting of USB-capable NUT drivers can involve not only raising the common NUT debug verbosity (e.g. using the DEBUG_MIN setting in ups.conf(5) or protocol commands to change the driver.debug value), but may also benefit from LibUSB specific debugging.

For the latter, you can set the LIBUSB_DEBUG driver option; alternatively you can classically export the environment variable LIBUSB_DEBUG before starting a NUT driver program (may be set and "exported" in driver init script or service method, perhaps via nut.conf(5)), to a numeric value such as 4 ("All messages are emitted").

For more details, including the currently supported values for your version of the library, see e.g.:

BUGS

Most contact-closure UPSes will not power down the load if the line power is present. This can create a race when using secondary upsmon(8) systems. See the upsmon(8) man page for more information.

The solution to both of these problems is to upgrade to a smart protocol UPS of some kind that allows detection and proper load cycling on command.

AUTHORS

  • Peter van Valderen <p.v.valderen at probu.nl>

  • Dirk Teurlings <dirk at upexia.nl>

SEE ALSO

The core driver:

nutupsdrv(8)

The generic serial driver:

genericups(8)

Internet resources:

The NUT (Network UPS Tools) home page: https://www.networkupstools.org/