My GKrellM window showing the UPS plugin in use.

GkrellM Belkin UPS monitor plugin

Current Version:

2.0.2 (4-Jan-2004) for GkrellM 2.x and GTK+2

1.0 Beta (6-Feb-2003) for GkrellM 1.2.x and GTK+1.2

Overview:

This GkrellM plugin communicates with a Belkin Sentry Bulldog or Network UPS Tools server and displays various pieces of UPS status information:

• Input, output and battery voltages.
• Input and output AC frequency.
• UPS load and temperature.
• UPS status messages.

Under NUT some or more of these variables may not be displayed, it all depends on whether the NUT driver for your UPS can make the information available. Note that the Belkin Sentry Bulldog support has only been tested using a Regulator Gold Pro series UPS connected via the serial cable. I have had reports that other Belkin UPSes use different protocols over the serial, and please don't even mention USB as I've had a report that even Belkin's software doesn't handle it properly...

The Obligatory Disclaimer: This plugin is not condoned, supported or in any way connected with Belkin Components Ltd. It is a third party (that's me) product which Belkin are not responsible for. This plugin does not send data to the upsd service or interface with the UPS directly, as such it will not affect the performance of your UPS: it is a monitor and nothing more. Just don't go complaining to Belkin if this plugin doesn't work because they won't be able to help you and you'll probably just annoy them!

Why keep Belkin support if NUT can be used?

Even though this version of the plugin can support NUT, I have retained the original Belkin UPS code. The key reason for this is that the Belkin protocol uses less network bandwidth than the NUT protocol (the Belkin code just listens for data, the NUT code has to send a request and then wait for a reply). Over a busy network the Belkin code will probably be rather more responsive than the NUT code. If you have absolutely no use for the belkin code, contact me and I'll see about adding an option to the configure script that;ll let you disable it completely.

Using it:

If you've got the hang of other GkrellM charts and monitors you'll know the routine: left click on a chart to toggle the text overlay, right click to bring up its settings window. Middle-click on the "UPS" panel to toggle a scrolling display of the last log message, right-click on it to bring up the plugin settings. If you can't get it to install or work, send me an email and I'll try to help out.

Changelog:

2.0.2 (4 Jan 2004)

Note that 1.0 has not been updated and should really be considered frozen.

• Fixed a bug in NUT variable handling that prevented available variables from being displayed if a preceeding one was not available (thanks to Jeremy Bryan Smith for pointing it out and providing the fix).
• The visibility of each of the four charts and panels (voltages, frequencies, temperature/load and log) can be modified in the new "Toggles" section of the configuration.

1.0 and 2.0 (6 Feb 2003)

These versions contain significant changes from the previous version so I won't list everything here. Major highlights include:

• a version for GKrellM 2 at last! :)
• Addition of support for Network UPS Tools (see the INSTALL file for information on how to enable this...)
• The source has been split over several files to aid readability and make it easier to maintain.
• Overhauled the UPS connection preferences to make them less confusing.
• autoconf scripts used for configuration and makefile generation. While there is some minor hacking going on in there (I couldn't find a neat way to make autconf compile the plugin and install it in the gkrellm plugin directory, so I've provided my own install target that does some magic to make it work) it seems to work quite well. On my system anyway - YMMV :)
• Lots of bugfixes, including some potentially segfault-inducing, embarrassing bad ones...

0.4 (31 Jul 2002)

• Bugfixes
  
  • Added missing includes to gkrellmbups.h
    (Thanks to mazar for pointing this out)
• Additions
  
  • Client thread retries connection to the upsd server every 5 seconds after lost or failed connection.
  • Optional fallback to port number taken from PRO_NET.DAT in connection retry.

0.3 (5 Jan 2002)

• Added default MAINS_MIN control for non-UK users.

0.2 (28 Dec 2001)

• Added user control over the mains voltage offset (see the docs for why this is a Good Thing).

0.1 (26 Dec 2001)

• Initial release version.

Download:

Plugin supplied as source, read INSTALL file for installation instructions.

gkrellmbups-2.0.0.tar.gz (74Kb) for GkrellM 2
gkrellmbups-1.0.0.tar.gz (80Kb) for GkrellM 1
gkrellmbups-0.4.tar.gz (30.2Kb)
gkrellmbups-0.3.tar.gz (28.7Kb)
gkrellmbups-0.2.tar.gz (28.3Kb)
gkrellmbups-0.1.tar.gz (27.5Kb)

See Also:

The GkrellM homepage

The waffle:

When I bought my Belkin 625VA Regulator Gold Pro Series UPS I was surprised to find that it was supplied with a Linux version of Belkin's Sentry Bulldog software in addition to the obvious Windows version. I was even more surprised when the Linux version installed and worked flawlessly while the Windoze version refused to even admit I had a UPS connected. Unfortunately the Sentry Bulldog "monitor" program has a rather poor information to screen area use ratio and it annoyed me that I needed another monitor to view the UPS status when I had GKrellM at the side of my screen...

The only GKrellM UPS plugin I could find any reference to appears to have disappeared - or at least the author's website fails to resolve now. Several search attempts failed to turn up any useful information about the numbers Belkin's ups server throws out, so I eventually decided that I had no other choice than to try and work it out myself. A bit of fiddling later and I had reverse engineered the more important fields in the upsd output and this plugin was started. anyone interested in seeing which bits I've managed to work out should look at the intro comment in ups_connect.c

The theme:

I've had a few people ask about the theme I'm using in the screenshot on this page. I use an XMMS skin called Ultrafina2000 but I couldn't find a GKrellM skin that had a similar look. So I put together this theme (8k) in the same style. If you want to use it, you'll need to set your charts to be 40 high and the "GkrellM Width" option to 90 or the background to the charts will look weird.