N4SZO

We had several storms over thepast weekend, nothing too major in my area but still enough to knock power off probably 6 times or so over the weekend. Well more are projected this weekend too so I broke down and did some quick research to get up to speed on UPS systems. They have come a long way since the early-mid nineties when they were very expensive, hard to set up and basically only network admins knew about them.. I bought a cheap APC home unit for $80.00 that is far better than the $500.00 commercial server version I had in the mid 90’s.

APC’s software for the unit doesn’t include unix servers, but when did that stop the linux community?

The software is now set to  cleanly shutdown the server if power has not returned within about 6 min till the battery is discharged. It also allows simple web status monitoring. If you check out the link below check out the other 2 links on the main page as well. 
http://n4szo.servebbs.net/cgi-bin/apcupsd/multimon.cgi

Happy 4th!!!

I have said it many times before but MS still doesn’t seem to get just *who* owns your computer.

Whatever happened to Microsoft’s DRM plan?

A little over 2 weeks ago I started to exercise again for the first time since school began and wow what a sucker punch!!!

I started easy, just walking one lap in the park which is about a 1 1/4 miles, yet talk about PAIN!  Only 80+ year old women were slower than me and not by much!
Before I started school , running 5 miles used to be no big deal but I guess that tells ya what SLIS does to you heath wise. But finally this week things got a bit better
and  tonight because I was in a hurry to get  somewhere else I  started to run for the first time and it was not as bad as I thought. Anyway I have noticed that it must be
doing some good  because for the past few days I have not felt like the walking dead when I wake up in the morning and I have not felt that way in some time

I think for some people exercise is like a drug and for those people stopping is a not a good idea. I must be one of those people unfortunately.
I say unfortunately because school is starting back up soon

Just a quick test of a new remote/offline blog poster I am trying out.

It’s called deepest sender fwiw. Note to any of my classmates: if you want to try this with
your wordpress blogs note the instructions are well…wrong for wordpress. They say
 to enter the posting url of your blog but no can do. Post the url of your blog + /xmlrpc.php
See this blog post for more details if interested.

This afternoon I was about to upgrade this server from the present Gos distribution to a full version of ubuntu. While I have not had the issues that  Meredith Farkas has written about in her blog, I do see folks squawking about the lack of support from the Gos folks. Seems they had a good idea but not really following through on it and have changed directions several times now. No biggie as I can just upgrade to the full ubunta 8.04 package as there is now a upgrade button appearing in my update manager for a month or so now. But the software upgrade fails and tells me that Gos doesn’t use a standard windows manager (the gui interface). Instead it uses an older one that is good for small machines but not really supported. So why did it offer me the upgrade??? Well not really sure why  but still no biggie as I can installed a modern and supported interface in a couple of minutes and be on my way.  But while I am waiting for the install to finish I start reading these horror stories about how the upgrade toasted folks machines and deleted their kernels!!!!  So not only I am holding off for now, I am also going to do a full backup of the system since I have so many hours of work invested in this little box now. My blog runs on it, the Health Kiosk runs on it and now my weather station runs on it so I figured it was about time to start looking at a backup solution. Long story short I have found something that looks very promising for both my personal use and also for my library. We currently use Ghost but the problem I have with Ghost is that it has become too OS version specific. If you don’t already know Ghost is hard drive imaging backup solution and at one time would backup just about any os you used. Why? because a true HD imaging package is backing up bits and shouldn’t know or even care what os you are running. But this is no longer true, especially since Ghost got bought out by a large corporation that starts with the letter S.  Now you must be super careful as the 2006 version will backup both windows 2000 and XP while 2007 version will refuse to backup 2000. Both versions, along with the corporate version will refuse to backup windows 2003 as  they make you buy  yet another version to backup 2003

They like to play games like this to keep you buying each year but it gets both old and expensive. On top of that none of them will backup a linux server (yet they did years ago)  so I went looking for an open source solution and found this:

http://www.clonezilla.org/

This software looks promising and of course it’s free which makes it even better. I tried the stand alone version and it backed up my linux server perfectly the first time I tested. At work Ghost sometimes had problems seeing our USB external drive and this one saw mine just fine on the first attempt.  I still need to verify the image but so far so good.

Take a look at the “library” version as well. This one does the same thing as the ghost corporate edition including multicasting, plus it supports more OS’s and protocals than Ghost Corporate edition.  I need to test more before I can honestly give this a full recommendation but can say it sure looks promising. I will be testing this on one of our servers at work sometime this week and will post back how it does on a larger box.

I will hold off on the full upgrade for now, but did go ahead and switch over to a more modern and better supported gui and already my remote control software likes the new desktop a bit better and it even loads a bit faster.

UPDATE: I tested Clonezilla  at work and it successfully backed up a windows xp machine running Centos Linux under vmware . I then restored to a different machine and Vola!-it worked pefect!This is good to know as this machine will be our new library web server. We are treading into new ground by  switching from a static html server to a mysql backed Drupel system. Now if myself or the “wonder kid” blows anything up we will be covered.

Just my luck- I fix my rain gauge yet it takes like over 2 weeks to get any rain- unheard of in Mobile! Don’t worry, I used that dry spell to repair my patio and stairs in my backyard. But to the point- Alabama Power runs all these ad’s claiming something like 99% Uptime, yet the first day we get a small storm they lose power. I can’t depend on them so a UPS is in order. If you look at the data, you can see the WX station’s buffer did it’s job and did not lose any data. 2.88 inches of rain and a max rain rate of 9.60 in/hr.

9.60 in/hr means we had a nice little downburst as around 5 in/hr used to flood my parents home.

Speaking of water, one of my other projects I have written about (on FB) appears to a new fad: Rain barrels. Since about 1 year ago, the cost of barrels has just about doubled. If I can’t find an inexpensive source of plastic barrels, well I already have a plan B (heavy duty garbage can sealed with 3m 5200 But still looking around right now before I go that route.

2 meta tags have now been added and the first shows a icon of the forecast and the second gives a text based forecast.

The software reads the forecast data from the console then dynamically generates the html code on the fly for each update.

According to the vendor (Davis), the forecast is  not calculated on  barometric pressure alone like inexpensive home weather stations but other factors such as physical location among others. In the past, I have compared it to a home weather station like you would find in target, etc and subjectively speaking it does seem to be a bit more accurate.  It seemed to be able to predict incoming fronts from a further distance than my inexpensive consumer model, but it’s still no substitute for a *good* and experienced weather professional.

I have also added an RSS data feed. It is embedded so you won’t see an icon, but just paste http://n4szo.servebbs.net/wx/ into your reader and you will be set.

My weather station is now storing the data in the mysql database and I have fixed several minor errors such as lat/long, sunrise/sunset calculations etc. I had a power failure today that shut down the server but the neat thing about this setup is the fact that the sensors operate on solar power (with both capacitor and battery backup) while the console that receives the data has battery backup as well. When I got home from work and restarted the server the console reconnected to the database and dumped several hours worth of data that the server had missed while shutdown!.  Important if you want accurate stats for trend analysis etc. Ok, maybe that is getting a bit  too  weather geeky but  good to know it has built in fault tolerance.  And now with summer and afternoon thunderstorms around the corner, I will need to buy a ups soon!

I spend the holidays doing plenty of overdue “outside in the yard” work including patio repair, garage painting, building a retaining wall, tree removal, and plenty of smaller chores that were waiting for me. But one “fun” thing I got to do was put my backyard weather station online. I had to do some maintenance on the rain gauge and move the unit back into position. A contractor had moved the unit to another part of the backyard when they were building the gate you can see in the photo and never put it back which allowed dirt to cause the rain collector to malfunction. After that I went searching for software packages that would collect data from the sensors and put it in a nice html format that could be viewed over this server. Needless to say I found something nice though it was not for the faint of heart as it required the installation and compiling of several libraries (graphic and communication based) before the software itself would compile properly. Oh it felt like a journy back in time say circa ‘99 when you had to compile anything useful for linux. But I think it is worth it and hope you agree. Below the sensor photo link is a link to the wx station. The outside sensors transmit (wirelessly) to a wx station console inside my house. That console has an optional usb interface that is hooked directly to my Walmark server. The software polls the Wx station console every minute for data updates. The radar image is supplied by our local weather service and the forecast is supplied by wunderground.com. Still going to make some additions, such as storing archive weather data in mysql database that runs this blog and the kiosk system. Also the wx console itself is capable of generating it’s own forecast and I plan on adding that as well. And lastly I will probably install a wireless usb system so the Wx station console can go back into my bedroom on the nightstand..  Enjoy!  Tnx goes to the Wview folks who make such nice software package for free!!

Backyard Weather Station

Link to N4SZO wx station

One of my SLISmates had an interest in this kind of fuel and was hoping it would be viable. Looks like she already found her answer

Have you been raiding those grease barrels Randi ?