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Xref: sserve comp.os.linux.development:12400 comp.unix.bsd:14423 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!concert!bigblue.oit.unc.edu!news.oit.unc.edu!johnsonm From: johnsonm@calypso-2.oit.unc.edu (Michael K. Johnson) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development,comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: APC UPS owners or potential buyers, trying to show user base Date: 29 Jul 1994 03:38:53 GMT Organization: Tea Conspiracy Lines: 53 Message-ID: <JOHNSONM.94Jul28233853@calypso-2.oit.unc.edu> References: <316bjc$hlh@thor.tjhsst.edu> <317k55$kq3@news.halcyon.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: calzone.oit.unc.edu In-reply-to: mpdillon@coho.halcyon.com's message of 28 Jul 1994 06:44:53 GMT In article <317k55$kq3@news.halcyon.com> mpdillon@coho.halcyon.com (Michael Dillon) writes: In article <316bjc$hlh@thor.tjhsst.edu>, Craig Metz <cmetz@thor.tjhsst.edu> wrote: > I had a talk today with Debbie Gray (sp?) of American Power Conversion >regarding trying to get information on how to communicate with their Smart >UPS products' onboard controllers in order to write a Linux driver. APC is >one of the *many* manufacturers that plays the old NDA game, i.e., ``we >consider that to be proprietary information that we have to protect''. H Really now! Those boxes use an RS-232 interface, right? What do they tell the computer? If they only communicate one thing (power fail) then it is probably something as simple as shorting the RD and SD lines. Get a technician to check it out for you while you pull the plug. The "Back-UPS" do this. If they are giving more info than that, then it probably can be reverse engineered with simple program to monitor the incoming serial port. The "Smart-UPS" are smarter. I'll be getting one, and I'll try to reverse-engineer it. Heck, the person at APC that I talked to said it would be fine if I wrote a program to do monitoring under Linux and distributed it freely. She didn't say anything about an NDA. Of course, I didn't ask for the details, either. I will after I buy it, and make a royal stink if they don't give them to me. If I have to, I'll get their unixware software, set up unixware (there's a spare copy at work I could borrow, it's not installed anywhere because it doesn't like the disk I offered it...) and monitor it. strace is available on unixware, too... :-) Actually, I have iBCS2 installed, so I may be able to use that to trace their cute software. I don't want to trust their software to shut down *my* machine, though; I'd write my own even if I used unixware. We'll see what happens. I remember a UPS that we set up about 7 years ago. I provided two terminals on the box that it shorted together when the power failed. We hooked them up to pins 2 and 3 on a serial port and made a little shell script daemon that periodically checked for powerfail every five minutes. When it got two hits in a row, it shutdown the system. That will work for their "Back-UPS", assuming you get the right combination of pins. I think that it is possible to talk back to the "Smart-UPS". I'd buy from a more open vendor, but APC is the *only* vendor with a decent LI product with 900kva in my price range. The next one is 1.5 times the cost, more than I can afford. michaelkjohnson