This chapter describes the various methods for installing Network UPS Tools.
Whenever it is possible, prefer installing from packages. Packagers have done an excellent and hard work at improving NUT integration into their system. On the other hand, distributions and appliances tend to package "official releases" of projects such as NUT, and so do not deliver latest and greatest fixes, new drivers, bugs and other features.
These are the essential steps for compiling and installing this software.
The NUT Packager Guide, which presents the best practices for installing and integrating NUT, is also a good reading.
The Prerequisites for building NUT on different OSes document suggests prerequisite packages with tools and dependencies available and needed to build and test as much as possible of NUT on numerous platforms, written from perspective of CI testing (if you are interested in getting updated drivers for a particular device, you might select a sub-set of those suggestions).
by default, your system probably won’t find the man pages, since they install to /usr/local/ups/man. You can fix this by editing your MANPATH, or just do this:
man -M /usr/local/ups/man <man page>
Create at least one system user and a group for running this software. You might call them "ups" and "nut". The exact names aren’t important as long as you are consistent.
The process for doing this varies from one system to the next, and explaining how to add users is beyond the scope of this document.
For the purposes of this document, the user name and group name will be ups and nut respectively.
Be sure the new user is a member of the new group! If you forget to do this, you will have problems later on when you try to start upsd.
Configure the source tree for your system. Add the --with-user and --with-group switch to set the user name and group that you created above.
./configure --with-user=ups --with-group=nut
If you need any other switches for configure, add them here. For example:
See Configure options from the User Manual, docs/configure.txt or ./configure --help for all the available options.
If you alter paths with additional switches, be sure to use those new paths while reading the rest of the steps.
Reference: Configure options from the User Manual.
make
This will build the NUT client and server programs and the selected drivers. It will also build any other features that were selected during configuration step above.
you should now gain privileges for installing software if necessary:
su
Install the files to a system level directory:
make install
This will install the compiled programs and man pages, as well as some data files required by NUT. Any optional features selected during configuration will also be installed.
This will also install sample versions of the NUT configuration files. Sample files are installed with names like ups.conf.sample so they will not overwrite any existing real config files you may have created.
If you are packaging this software, then you will probably want to use the DESTDIR variable to redirect the build into another place, i.e.:
make DESTDIR=/tmp/package install make DESTDIR=/tmp/package install-conf
Create the state path directory for the driver(s) and server to use for storing UPS status data and other auxiliary files, and make it group-writable by the group of the system user you created.
mkdir -p /var/state/ups chmod 0770 /var/state/ups chown root:nut /var/state/ups
Set ownership data and permissions on your serial or USB ports that go to your UPS hardware. Be sure to limit access to just the user you created earlier.
These examples assume the second serial port (ttyS1) on a typical Slackware system. On FreeBSD, that would be cuaa1. Serial ports vary greatly, so yours may be called something else.
chmod 0660 /dev/ttyS1 chown root:nut /dev/ttyS1
The setup for USB ports is slightly more complicated. Device files for USB devices, such as /proc/bus/usb/002/001, are usually created "on the fly" when a device is plugged in, and disappear when the device is disconnected. Moreover, the names of these device files can change randomly. To set up the correct permissions for the USB device, you may need to set up (operating system dependent) hotplugging scripts. Sample scripts and information are provided in the scripts/hotplug and scripts/udev directories. For most users, the hotplugging scripts will be installed automatically by "make install".
(If you want to try if a driver works without setting up hotplugging, you can add the "-u root" option to upsd, upsmon, and drivers; this should allow you to follow the below instructions. However, don’t forget to set up the correct permissions later!).
if you are using something like udev or devd, make sure these permissions stay set across a reboot. If they revert to the old values, your drivers may fail to start.
You are now ready to configure NUT, and start testing and using it.
You can jump directly to the NUT configuration.
This chapter describes the specific installation steps when using binary packages that exist on various major systems.
NUT is packaged and well maintained in these systems. The official Debian packager is part of the NUT Team.
Using your preferred method (apt-get, aptitude, Synaptic, …), install the nut package, and optionally the following:
Configuration files are located in /etc/nut. nut.conf(5) must be edited to be able to invoke /etc/init.d/nut
Ubuntu users can access the APT URL installation by clicking on this link.
NUT is packaged and well maintained in these systems. The official Mandriva packager is part of the NUT Team.
Using your preferred method (urpmi, RPMdrake, …), install one of the two below packages:
Optionally, you can also install the following:
NUT is packaged and well maintained in these systems. The official SUSE packager is part of the NUT Team.
Install the nut-classic package, and optionally the following:
SUSE and openSUSE users can use the one-click install method to install NUT.
NUT is packaged and well maintained in these systems. The official Red Hat packager is part of the NUT Team.
Using your preferred method (yum, Add/Remove Software, …), install one of the two below packages:
Optionally, you can also install the following:
You can either install NUT as a binary package or as a port.
The port is located under sysutils/nut.
Use make config to select configuration options, e.g. to build the optional CGI scripts.
To install it, use:
# make install clean
For USB UPS devices the NUT package/port installs devd rules in /usr/local/etc/devd/nut-usb.conf to set USB device permissions. devd needs to be restarted for these rules to apply:
# service devd restart
(Re-)connect the device after restarting devd and check that the USB device has the proper permissions. Check the last entries of the system message buffer. You should find an entry like
# dmesg | tail [...] ugen0.2: <INNO TECH USB to Serial> at usbus0
The device file must be owned by group uucp and must be group
read-/writable. In the example from above this would be
# ls -Ll /dev/ugen0.2 crw-rw---- 1 root uucp 0xa5 Mar 12 10:33 /dev/ugen0.2
If the permissions are not correct, verify that your device is registered in
/usr/local/etc/devd/nut-usb.conf. The vendor and product id can be found
using:
# usbconfig -u 0 -a 2 dump_device_desc
where -u specifies the USB bus number and -a specifies the USB device index.
You are now ready to configure NUT, and start testing and using it.
You can jump directly to the NUT configuration.