nut-ipmipsu - Man Page

Driver for IPMI Power Supply Units (PSU)

Synopsis

nut-ipmipsu -h

nut-ipmipsu -a PSU_NAME [OPTIONS]

Note

This driver is experimental, and still a work-in-progress. Feedback is encouraged.

Note

This man page only documents the hardware-specific features of the nut-ipmipsu driver. For information about the core driver, see nutupsdrv(8).

Supported Hardware

This driver should support a wide range of PSUs through local IPMI interface.

nut-ipmipsu currently uses the GNU FreeIPMI project, for IPMI implementation.

Extra Arguments

This driver doesn’t support any optional settings.

Installation

This driver may be not built by default. You can build it by installing the libfreeipmi-dev dependencies and using configure --with-ipmi=yes.

You also need to give proper permissions on the local IPMI device file (/dev/ipmi0 for example) to allow the NUT user to access it.

An udev rules file (nut-ipmipsu.rules) is provided and automatically installed on an udev enabled system. This file is generally installed in /etc/udev/rules.d/, or /lib/udev/rules.d/ on newer systems, to address the permission settings problem.

For more information, refer to scripts/udev/README.adoc in NUT sources.

Instant Commands

This driver doesn’t support any instant commands.

Implementation

The port value is used to identify the PSU. For instance, to target FRU 0x2, use the following in ups.conf:

[pdu]
        driver = nut-ipmipsu
        port = id2

This driver will report various information related to a PSU, including:

manufacturer, model, serial and part numbers,
nominal voltage and frequency,
actual current and voltage,
status of the PSU:
- OL means that the PSU is present and providing power,
- OFF means that the PSU is present but not providing power (power cable removed),
- stale (no data) means that the PSU is not present (i.e. physically removed).

Here is an example output for a Dell r610 server:

device.mfr: DELL
device.mfr.date: 01/05/11 - 08:51:00
device.model: PWR SPLY,717W,RDNT
device.part: 0RN442A01
device.serial: CN179721130031
device.type: psu
driver.name: nut-ipmipsu
driver.parameter.pollinterval: 2
driver.parameter.port: id2
driver.version: 2.6.1-3139M
driver.version.data: IPMI PSU driver
driver.version.internal: 0.01
input.current: 0.20
input.frequency.high: 63
input.frequency.low: 47
input.voltage: 232.00
input.voltage.maximum: 264
input.voltage.minimum: 90
ups.id: 2
ups.realpower.nominal: 717
ups.status: OL
ups.voltage: 12

Known Issues

Using host names for UPS NMC

An UPS network management card may be assigned a fixed/static IP address or a dynamic one (e.g. by DHCP) in your network. Due to this, you may want or have to use a dynamic naming service to access the UPS. Note that this may become a problem specifically during large outages and shutdowns, when your DHCP/DNS server might already go down while the driver needs to resolve the name involved (especially during late-shutdown hooks, when a new instance of the driver program might start just to tell the UPS to power off or to power-cycle).

It may be wise to ensure your OS name service client can cache the UPS name sufficiently long, or to use fixed IP addressing (and an entry in /etc/hosts for good measure, so you only have one spot to eventually re-configure this).

Author

Arnaud Quette <arnaud.quette@free.fr>

Referenced By

nut(7), nutupsdrv(8), upsd(8).

08/15/2025 Network UPS Tools 2.8.4 NUT Manual