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networkupstools/nut
The Network UPS Tools repository. UPS management protocol Informational RFC 9271 published by IETF at https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9271 Please star NUT on GitHub, this helps with sponsorships!
NUT is the de facto standard for UPS/PDU management on Linux and BSD, with a 25+ year history. It implements a layered driver/server/client architecture where a single UPS can serve many networked hosts, and it has an IETF RFC (9271) for its protocol. The target audience is sysadmins protecting servers from power loss, from homelabs to data centers.
Massive hardware compatibility list — if your UPS exists, there's probably a driver; covers USB HID, SNMP, Modbus, serial contact closure, and proprietary protocols. The layered architecture (driver → upsd → upsmon) is genuinely well-designed: secondary hosts can monitor and safely shut down even when they have no direct USB/serial connection to the UPS. The protocol is standardized as RFC 9271, so third-party clients and integrations can be built against a stable spec. CI matrix is unusually broad — they test across decades of OS versions and compilers, which matters for infrastructure software that has to survive on ancient RHEL boxes.
Build system is autoconf/automake, which means a painful configure-make-make-install dance that most developers haven't touched since the 2000s; no CMake or modern alternative. Configuration is split across multiple flat text files (ups.conf, upsd.conf, upsmon.conf, upsd.users) with no validation tooling — a typo silently breaks things at runtime. The CGI web interface is a relic from 1999 that requires libgd and a manually secured Apache setup; there's no modern REST API or web UI. The README is an AsciiDoc file with raw macro conditionals leaking into the GitHub renderer, making the first impression rough for anyone evaluating the project.