APC SmartUPS recognition problems (”device not accepting address X, error -110″ or “device descriptor read/64, error -110″)
Thursday, February 8th, 2007After the power scare in December, I decided to run apcupsd to perform an orderly shutdown of Asterisk when the power failed.
I discovered something interesting about my APC UPS, though. If the UPS is connected to the computer when it first boots, the computer will be unable to recognize it. If they are not connected when the computer boots, everything will be fine.
I first noticed the problem when bringing my network rack back up from a forced power fail situation. Rather than recognizing the UPS, I received the following messages from the kernel:
usb 1-1: new low speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 7
usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 1-1: new low speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 8
usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 1-1: new low speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 9
usb 1-1: device not accepting address 9, error -110
I was able to diagnose the problem by using a separate computer connected to the serial port on the UPS. With a helpful guide to the APC “smart” serial protocol (it’s really pretty brain-dead), I could interact with the UPS via serial from a laptop running on battery power. When the UPS was running normally, I could type commands to the serial port, like this:
YSM
NA
Smart-UPS 750 XL
B27.67
F60.00
XCOK
022.0
C022.0
f100.0
j0086:
k0
m08/31/02
nAS0235331770(
o120
y(C) APCC
p090
However, I noticed that when I was interacting with the UPS on serial and the Asterisk box came up when connected via USB, the serial port would freeze up. If I disconnect the Linux system from the UPS and plug it in after the system boots, then everything is OK. I am running the USB code as a module. Maybe it would be different compiled into the kernel.