After nearly a year of working on it in my spare time, I'm proud 
to announce the first general release of my unipower package.

The unipower package is basically a hack of Miquel van 
Smoorenburg's powerd daemon, which is distributed in the SysVInit 
package.  The express aim of the unipower package is to add 
additional functionally and a simpler means of configuring UPS 
monitoring, in a full featured suite that can be configured to 
work with most UPSs featuring an RS232 monitoring port.

Depending on the UPS, cable, and the manner in which the unipower 
package is configured, the unipower package provides the 
following features:

 * Line power sensing, to detect when the power has failed and 
   initiate a delayed shutdown, or other appropriate actions.  
   This facility also allows the system to cancel the shutdown if 
   power is restored before the system is shutdown.

 * Low battery detection, to detect when the UPS's battery is 
   running low and initiate an immediate shutdown.

 * Physical cable detection, to detect connection errors.

 * The ability to kill the UPS's inverter.  This shuts the 
   inverter on the UPS off, to prevent the system from draining 
   the UPS's battery after it has shutdown.  This allows the 
   system to restart itself, as if the power had been turned on 
   when line power is restored. 

   Additionally, this helps the UPS to retain enough power to 
   deal with power yo-yos, where the power comes up and goes down 
   several times before being fully restored.

 * The unitest program, included in the unipower package, will 
   monitor the status of a serial line and report changes in the 
   status of the line.  The information provided by unitest can 
   then be used to configure the unipower package for your UPS 
   and cable combination.

Instructions for configuring the unipower package are contained 
in the documentation (unipower.docs) and should be read carefully 
before proceeding.

Please let me know if you find any problems, if you have 
suggestions for enhancing the package, or if you have information 
on connecting unipower to a UPS that isn't covered in the 
documentation.

Tom Webster
webster@kaiwan.com
04/09/95
