nut-1.2.2: description + notes

NUT (Network UPS Tools) is a collection of programs that provide a common interface for monitoring and administering UPS hardware. It uses a layered approach to connect all of the parts.

Drivers are provided for a wide assortment of equipment. They understand the specific language of each UPS and map it back to a compatibility layer. This means both an expensive smart protocol UPS and a simple power strip model can be handled transparently.

This information is cached by the network server upsd, which then answers queries from the clients. upsd contains a number of access control features to limit the abilities of the clients. Only authorized hosts may monitor or control your UPS hardware if you wish. Since the notion of monitoring over the network is built into the software, you can hang many systems off one large UPS and they will all shut down together.

Clients such as upsmon(8) check on the status of the hardware and do things when necessary. The most important task is shutting down the operating system cleanly before the UPS runs out of power. Other programs are also provided to log UPS status regularly, monitor status through your web browser, and more.

NUT includes also CGI clients that run through your web server. They allow you to see UPS status and perform certain administrative commands from any web browser. Javascript and cookies are not required. The CGI programs use a configuration file, hosts.conf, to see if they are allowed to talk to a host. This keeps malicious visitors from creating queries from your web server to random hosts on the Internet.

Some SGI-specific files have been added to this distribution, specifically the /etc/init.d startup scripts and /usr/freeware/etc/nut/nut-apache.conf.sample, a sample Apache config file.


Special thanks to Andrea Suatoni (a.suatoni@telefonica.net) for helping port this package to IRIX.
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