Jim Klimov via Nut-upsuser <nut-upsuser@alioth-lists.debian.net> writes:
> The opposite opinion is that programs should be quiet until asked to
> squeak (e.g. by restarting with higher debug verbosity... "that would help
> troubleshooting why the rack went down last week, right!" says the sysadmin
> me).
That's a fair summary but my opinion is:
daemon-type programs should not by default emit things to
stdout/stderr, unless the daemon can't run. Things like "upsd
2.8.0.1" started are ok in syslog at LOG_INFO and we could probably
regularize that.
version is not interesting, because it's easy to tell what version is
installed, and a well-run system has only one copy of nut. And -D can
print it to find out; it will be the same after a failure or before.
"upsmon -K", documented to return 0/1, should not print by default
version
that there is no pidfile
that a upsmon daemon is or is not running
the location of POWERDOWNFLAG
and even that POWERDOWNFLAG is not set
I'm ok with printing one line to stdout that it is set, because that's
a big deal.
I'm -1 but not a big deal on printing that is NOT set, because that's
normal.
I think it would be good to stat the dir containing POWERDOWNFLAG and
print a warning if it is not there.
All the notable things that lead to shutdown (UPS going on battery,
lowbatt, decision to shutdown, setting FSD flag, setting killpower,
calling shutdown) are fair game for syslog.
syslog should mostly survive for post-mortem analysis
console output is ephemeral anyway, usually
extra info is harmful because it makes everything harder to read; a
bigger haystack to find a needle (which may be not about nut)
Specifically, I find all of this to be noise:
Network UPS Tools upsmon 2.8.0.1
Note: A previous upsmon instance is already running!
Usually it should not be running during OS shutdown,
which is when checking POWERDOWNFLAG makes most sense.
UPS: foo@localhost (primary) (power value 1)
Using power down flag file /etc/killpower
Power down flag is not set
as the man page says "retrrns 0 or 1" and this is replacing
if [ -f /etc/killpower ]; then
upsmon startup:
Network UPS Tools upsmon 2.8.0.1
kill: No such process
UPS: foo@localhost (primary) (power value 1)
Using power down flag file /etc/killpower
again, all knowable statically from config.
upsd:
Network UPS Tools upsd 2.8.0.1
fopen /var/db/nut/upsd.pid: No such file or directory
Could not find PID file '/var/db/nut/upsd.pid' to see if previous upsd
instance is already running!
listening on 127.0.0.1 port 3493
listening on ::1 port 3493
Connected to UPS [foo]: bestfortress-foo
Found 1 UPS defined in ups.conf
again, all what was configured.
> So here is a shout-out to other practitioners: should NUT programs print
> their banner and other info (e.g. competing daemon instance was/wasn't
> found and how that was determined) every time they start by default? Or
> should they indeed be revised to talk less (and then settings and
> init-scripts in packaging can be tweaked to retain current behavior should
> distros/users want to)? Note that an alternative is to redirect to
> /dev/null the messages in init-scripts and similar integrations instead.
It's not, because redirecting to /dev/null loses the ability for output
that is notable to appear.
And a question from me:
Have you ever had a situation where the above verbose info, printed on
stdout/stderr, was useful in diagnosing a previous problematic
shutdown (a real one, not a testing one)? If so please describe.
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