I am trying to remotely manage 5 APC UPS devices of various ages.
I have spent some time working with apcupsd and related apps and have had no issues with this working on a local machine, ie the UPS serving the local computer. Where I have run into problems is with trying to configure apcupsd.conf to work with several machines over my subnet. I have not been able to include more than one block of details. As soon as I add details for a second machine the first connection breaks. I conclude that apcupsd does not support monitoring multiple devices even though the gui suggests otherwise.
This leaves me with the option of setting up services for each machine on every machine or using the cgi, which requires me to set up an apache2 server on every machine. This does not appeal so I may have to abandon apcuspd and use NUT. I do note that apcupsd is dated now and not much supported.
Before I get stuck into this, does anybody have any related info, experience or advice on what route to take.
You have to run multiple daemons in my experience, each with its own configuration file.
I have two APC UPSes connected to a Raspberry Pi, and each has its own config file and daemon running, each with its own service file.
I do my monitoring a little differently beyond that - I have a flow in node-red that reads that status and lets me know if the status changes (so I get notifications via slack message and push notification on my phone). But the fundamental apcupsd configuration is separate daemons per UPS.
Many thanks for the replies. I have been quite successful with apcupsd on local systems each with their own UPS.
I am still trying to work out how to work with two or three computers all powered by the one UPS, all needing monitoring and shut down control but not necessarily all running at the same time.
I have tried to use apcupsd-gui thinking that I could have it monitor several UPS/computers on my network but failed and concluded that I would need to set up separate services.
At this point I posted this and have now concluded that the best solution would be to have one machine to monitor and control all the different systems using snmp for network control with local shutdown for respective computer/ups installations.
This brings me to SNMP, for me totally new. Where can I find the TW manual to start reading please.
Hi and thanks again. Your posts have helped me get my thinking straight.
I see from hendersj’s post that his configuration, ie. one computer monitoring two UPS devices is similar to what I am looking for:-
My typical configuration has one computer powered by one UPS. In some cases the UPS is dedicated to powering network hub with switches etc but no local computer. Based on hendersj’s experience and my own to date this will serve most of my needs. For now I therefore intend to go down the route of using apcupsd, each with dedicated service.
For the more difficult case where I have one 3000VA UPS powering network switch and three workstations the configuration for control and monitoring will be more difficult. I should add that not all machines on the UPS will necessarily be on all the time.
I recall some posts on line which I need to find and read on this.
Standing back a little it is clear that a network administrator would be using SNMP for all this. Malcolm’s link to Grafana is interesting but the bottom line is I need to at least read and understand the basics. I am struggling with issues like NUT, SNMP community strings and basic network security.
For now I shall continue with the “easier” stuff. Many thanks once more.
This is more difficult than I thought! Using my TW HP Z640 workstation to access either UPS network management controller I can see they are configured for their respective machine IP but when I look at the APC settings for tab Contol>Security>Session Management on either machine I can see that they both use the same IP.
The help menu tells me:-
This section lists all of the currently logged in users, the interface from which they are logged in, their IP address, and the amount of time they have been logged in. A specific user session can be terminated (with the appropriate authority) by selecting the user name.
My problem is that this IP is the DHCP dongle I installed and intended only for use by the KVM VMs. I thought I had set up my network with this intention but clearly this is not working as it should and may be causing some of my problems.
How can I configure my network manager to prevent the dongle from being used when no KVM VM is running?
Hi Malcolm, thanks for reminding me. It seems I never disabled dhcp for ipv4/6 back then as the connections are shown as auto. To what should I change them? I have now used disabled. Hope that is now correct.
Returning to this thread after an excursion to correct my network connections I have had only limited success with trying to monitor several PC UPS devices. I have been working with separate instances of the apcupsd.conf file and also tried using apcupsd-gui. and separate computers. I was able to get the gui working and monitoring two machines on one computer but failed with a third.
I shall continue for a little longer but meanwhile Malcolm suggested I look at Grafana and there is a plugin for Nagios in the TW repo so I coould look into Nagios. Does anybody have any experience which would enable me to decide what monitoring app I should use?
Budgie2
Clearly I am well out of my depth. I had been trying to get acpupsd to connect several devices using the snmp connection because this was the only one that worked.
I left the apcupsd daemon running and tried to run a windows 10 vm to get an APC update tool. It failed. I had no internet access.
Since I had in this thread already been reminded of how to set up a VM on this machine, found an error, corrected it and had it working perfectly, you can imagine my feelings when the VM failed to connect to the internet.
I stopped the apcupsd daemon and disabled it to be sure and now my VM is working again.
Darn, i guess if you had the time youcould reverse engineer the protocol that these devices use and create you own custom bash/[insert tool of choice] program and do it that way.
I have at last mastered using apcupsd with NMC cards installed on APC UPS devices.
Time flies when your having fun.
Thanks for the thoughts.
Regards,
Budge