Desc: Using upsmon and your pager together
File: pager.txt
Date: 28 May 2001
Auth: Russell Kroll <rkroll@exploits.org>

upsmon can call out to a helper script or program when the UPS changes
state.  The example upsmon.conf has a full list of which state changes
are available - ONLINE, ONBATT, LOWBATT, and more.

The simple approach
-------------------

 - Set EXEC flags on various things in upsmon.conf

   NOTIFYFLAG ONBATT EXEC
   NOTIFYFLAG ONLINE EXEC

   If you want other things like WALL or SYSLOG to happen, just add them.

   NOTIFYFLAG ONBATT EXEC+WALL+SYSLOG

   You get the idea.

 - Tell upsmon where your script is

   NOTIFYCMD /path/to/my/script

 - Make a simple script like this at that location:   

	#! /bin/bash
	echo "$*" | sendmail -F"ups@mybox" bofh@pager.example.com

 - Restart upsmon, pull the plug, and see what happens.

That approach is bare-bones, but you should get the text content of the
alert in the body of the message, since upsmon passes the alert text
(from NOTIFYMSG) as an argument.

This will send mail every time something happens which may become annoying
rather quickly, especially for simple power fluctuations.  To only send
messages after some interval, see the upssched.txt file for information
on offset events.

Using more advanced features
----------------------------

Your helper script will be run with a few environment variables set.  

	   UPSNAME - the name of the system that generated the change.
                     This will be one of your identifiers from the MONITOR
                     lines in upsmon.conf.

	NOTIFYTYPE - this will be ONLINE, ONBATT, or whatever event took
                     place which made upsmon call your script.

You can use these to do different things based on which system has
changed state.  You could have it only send pages for an important
system while totally ignoring a known trouble spot, for example.

Suppressing notify storms
-------------------------

upsmon will call your script every time an event happens that has the
EXEC flag set.  This means a quick power failure that lasts mere seconds
might generate several pages in a row.  To suppress this sort of
annoyance, use upssched as your NOTIFYCMD program, and configure it to
send pages after a timer has elapsed.  See upssched.txt for more
information.