SOLVED APC BackUPS Pro 500 - finally working, yes

[Arwen]

I bought this UPS because it was small, had built in networking and had a 5 year battery life. Ended up with some other great features, like outlet power consumption and individual outlet power control.

But, I was never able to get it to work with my FreeNAS using Nut. Neither USB or network seemed to work. So I just hoped my power outages were short term. So far, all have been.

Today, I think I found the magic spell to make it work.

1. Using dmesg | grep -i --color american I determined that my UPS was a HID USB device, not a ugen which is the only USB menu options. Turns out I can change it to /dev/uhid0.
2. Select an APC model that uses usbhid-ups for the driver. The closest one by name was APC ups 2 Back-UPS Pro USB USB.
   
3. Next, my product ID code was not recognized. So, poking around I found I could add this to the ups.conf extra options, productid = 0004.

Don't really know which other settings need changing.

Now that I have it working, I might get a second one for the desktop side.

Things to do:

• Try a power fail. (FreeNAS is running a scrub, no need to interrupt that.)
• Reboot and make sure Nut works after. (Try another power fail.)
  
• Check Nut's productid on their web site. If not present, report upstream bug. If present, report a FreeNAS bug to refresh Nut.

 

[Arwen]

Submitted a feature request to improve UPS / Nut documentation, in related to changing the Port: field to support HID USB devices;

https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/25501

Note that this is not related to the product ID code part. Still need to research and see if upstream has 0004 codes.

 

[Arwen]

Tested an A.C. power fail, my FreeNAS shutdown gracefully.
After booting my FreeNAS, tried another A.C. power fail, it worked and shutdown gracefully.

Now I just need to figure out the productid in the Nut source code. It appears the only programmed one is 0x0001. But, that does not make sense. Oh well.