Extraneous/garbage "A" Characters Printing to the Console

[Beth Richardson]

Stephen/Torsten,

I have not been able to find much information about the ptupsd. This is a path I have been going down this morning. Until I find the ptupsd info, I don't feel comfortable stopping the daemon. I will let you know when I find something. I have a sneaky suspicion that if I stop the daemon, the A characters will also stop.

All systems being discussed are indeed rp7410s. All are configured with a single partition. However, each UPS supports two of the rp7410s.

The 2 problem systems (sys1 and sys3) have an A6144 connector attached to the MP serial port on the server. A UPS connection is then made from the "UPS" leg of the A6144 connector to the "UPS serial port" on the UPS. In our configuration, we have sys1 and sys2 using one UPS, and sys3 and sys4 using another UPS.

At this point, I am relatively certain that I need to reconfigure UPS to use port tty0p1 instead of tty0p0. This setting is correct in /etc/ups_conf, but not correct when I look at UPS Manager II configurations. Once I learn a bit more about UPS and UPS Manager II, I'll make the change and let you know how it goes.

Thanks,
Beth

[Torsten.]

If you feel the ups manager is needed, configure it again using the GUI or the ascii based config tool /opt/upsmgr/manager/bin/upsmgrascii

HTH!

[Torsten.]

PS:

and the proxy, of course:

/opt/upsmgr/proxy/bin/setup

[Torsten.]

curious, your last reply is appeared *after* my last 2 postings.

In this case you will need the proxy on the servers connected to the ups. use the proxy config tool to configure the tty device.
Disable the ups_mond, it's not needed and will produce errors.

[Beth Richardson]

Hi Everyone,

The problem appears to be resolved. Using /opt/upsmgr/proxy/bin/setup, I changed the configuration to:
UPS-ID: 1, Daemon: ptupsd, Device: /dev/tty0p1, IdentName:

from its previous configuration:
UPS-ID: 1, Daemon: ptupsd, Device: /dev/tty0p0, IdentName:

Note that I had to stop/restart the monitor and kill off the old ptupsd daemon before the AAAAAA characters stopped.

Thanks so much for the helpful ideas. Especially Torsten and Steve! I gave you guys both 10s on your last posts as a thanks for all the help over the last two days. You have helped us retain what lAittlAAe saAnitAAAy we had leftAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA...

I will test the UPS configuration during our next maintenance period and will repost if things go badly.

Regards,
Beth

[Stephen Keane]

It's always a good idea to test that the UPS and the daemon actually work! Try removing the power from the UPS and make sure that the server shuts down cleanly. If the server doesn't respond you still have approximately 10 - 15 minutes (depending on the UPS capacity and the number of things you have plugged into it) to either reapply the power, or shutdown the server yourself. Just a thought, you really don't want to find out that it doesn't work when you come in one morning and the power failed during the night :)

[Bill Hassell]

As a followup on UPS testing: most UPS software packages will have several messages and configuration options. The first (non-invasive. no shutdown needed) is a warning message that the UPS is on battery. This is a minimum requirement for high availability equipment. The next (also warning, no shutdown) is selftest failure or low battery capacity. And the most important is auto-shutdown when on battery and less than a few minutes remain. UPS software seems to be one of the big mysteries in the world of Unix...mostly because UPS companies write the code. They are great at building UPS's but software and ease of install and use are highly varied. Be sure to verify what messages are available, where they are logged and that all critical components are actually plugged into the protected side of the UPS.

[Beth Richardson]

Thanks Bill and Stephen (sorry for getting your name wrong in my last posting). I appreciate the follow-up advice. We will be testing the servers in our next maintenance period by pulling power and closely monitoring what happens so our servers don't actually crash.

Regards,
Beth