A Line Dropped By A Ghost

Here is how to make a Belkin 350VA UPS Soho series run with their Bulldog software under Debian Linux (Woody).

I have run this under 2.2 and 2.4 kernels.

Grab the latest version of Bulldog from Belkin, 3.2 as of writing this article. New UPS’s in Australia come with the drivers on the install disk.

1. Copy the tar ball onto your harddrive.
   cp linux.tar.gz
2. Untar it.
   tar -xvfz linux.tar.gz
3. Log in as root if not already.
   su
4. Go into belkin directory.
   cd belkin
5. Run install app.
   ./install
   This will copy all the files needed into “/etc/belkin/”
   It will not be able to create a script in “/etc/rc.local” due to Debian using “/etc/rc.boot” for it boot scripts (We will do something about this later).
6. Once finished installing, the configure menu will open up. Change the settings as you want, but remember to get the serial port correct. I have found that it install with the default of ttyS1, but all my boxes use ttyS0. So experiment if you have more than one serial port on your box.Once finish press “s” to save and “q” to quit.
7. You next need to edit you preshutdown.ini.
   vim /etc/belkin/preshutdown.bat
8. Remove the two sync commands by going to the lines and pressing “d” twice on it. Then press “ESC” and type “:wq” to save and quit.
9. Next file you need to edit is shutdown.bat script.
   vim /etc/belkin/shutdown.ini
10. Remove the “/sbin/halt” line and add:
    /sbin/shutdown -h -t 1 now
    save and quit. Note that this needs to be the 1st and only line in this file.
11. Create a boot script:
    vim /etc/rc.boot/ups
12. Write in the script
    #!/bin/bash
/etc/belkin/belkin start
    Write and quit
13. Change the startup script to excute.
    chmod +x /etc/rc.boot/ups

This should now be a working UPS monitoring utility. To test, plug your box into a different power point (not the ups) and then plug the ups and monitor what is happening with the command:

/etc/belkin/belkin status

This isn’t a very complete guide, just a quick one with out any troubleshooting, but hopefully for anyone out there that is trying to do the same thing I did, this will help.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 15th, 2005 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.