Tripp Lite B093-004-2E4U-V Owner's Manual

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15. Advanced Conﬁguration

15.9.3 Adding New RPC Devices

There are a number of simple paths to adding support for new RPC devices.

The ﬁrst is to have scripts support the particular RPC included in either the open source PowerMan project (http://

sourceforge.net/projects/powerman) or the open source NUT UPS Tools project. The PowerMan device speciﬁcations

are rather peculiar, and it is suggested you leave the actual writing of these scripts to the PowerMan authors. However,

documentation on how they work can be found at http://linux.die.net/man/5/powerman.dev. The Network UPS Tools (NUT)

project has recently moved on from its UPS management origins to also cover SNMP PDUs (and embrace PowerMan). Tripp

Lite progressively includes the updated PowerMan and NUT build into the console server ﬁrmware releases.

The second path is to directly add support for the new RPC devices (or to customize the existing RPC device support) on

your console server. The Manage: Power page uses information contained in /etc/powerstrips.xml to conﬁgure and control

devices attached to a serial port. The conﬁguration also searches for (and loads) /etc/conﬁg/powerstrips.xml (if it exists).

The user can add their own support for more devices by adding their deﬁnitions into /etc/conﬁg/powerstrips.xml. This ﬁle can

be created on a host system and copied to the management console device using scp. Alternately, log in to the management

console and use ftp or wget to transfer ﬁles.

Here is a brief description of the elements of the XML entries in /etc/conﬁg/powerstrips.xml:

<id>Name or ID of the device support</id>

<outlet port=”port-id-1”>Display Port 1 in menu</outlet>

<outlet port=”port-id-2”>Display Port 2 in menu</outlet>

...

<on>script to turn power on</on>

<off>script to power off</off>

<cycle>script to cycle power</cycle>

<status>script to write power status to /var/run/power-status</status>

<charsize>character size</charsize>

<parity>parity setting</parity>

</powerstrip>

The id appears on the web page in the list of available devices types to conﬁgure.

The outlets describe targets that the scripts can control. For example, a power control board may control several different

outlets. The port-id is the native name for identifying the outlet. This value will be passed to the scripts in the environment

variable outlet, allowing the script to address the correct outlet.

There are four possible scripts: on, off, cycle and status.

When a script is run, its standard input and output is redirected to the appropriate serial port. The script receives the outlet

and port in the outlet and port environment variables, respectively.

The script can be anything that can be executed within the shell.

All of the existing scripts in /etc/powerstrips.xml use the pmchat utility.

pmchat works just like the standard UNIX “chat” program, except it ensures interoperation with the port manager.

The ﬁnal options speed, charsize, stop and parity deﬁne the recommended or default settings for the attached device.

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Tripp Lite B093-004-2E4U-V 4-Port Console Server with 4G LTE Cellular Gateway, Dual GbE NIC, 4Gb Flash and Dual SIM