The Engineek

Leave it to the Germans. I knew the video was older when I saw the Spice Girls there to guest host. Looks like 1997… Yay Rupert.

 

Hydraulics, Guts, & A Good Operator

OK, so this guy is nutz…and I don’t care WHAT they pay him!

This tower was specifically built to show off the physical power of the excavator.

 

Nice LED patterns a la Cylon.

I got bit HARD today. I don’t think it will leave a scar, but still.

At 6AM this morning (Sunday), the adding of 3×750GB drives to an existing 4×750 RAID 6 array completed. After starting 8AM Saturday LAST WEEK. Effectively it took 8 days to get the capacity expanded. After all that waiting, I still only had 2TB available, when 7×750GB should give me 5×750 in effective space in a RAID 6 array. So why the missing 1.4TB? Time to troll.

After getting bounced around a bit between FAQ entries, trolling yields a hook on Adaptec’s site: “Microsoft operating system support for greater than 2TB RAID arrays“.  Of course that links off to a nice prescriptive KB: Q302873.

Turns out that you need to have the drive use a GUID partitioning table instead of MBR in order to use sizes over 2TB.  So I’ve got to remove all partitions on the volume, and change the scheme over to GPT.  That means more delays as I copy off about 1TB of data so I can wipe the volume. 

Adaptec is slightly more forgiving in this situation, as the RAID 6 array doesn’t appear to require any modifications.

My advice to you:  When creating large array volumes in Windows Server 2008 and later, choose the GPT scheme when initializing the drive in Windows.

All in all: This sucks.  I hate getting bit, especially when I don’t see it coming.

Update:  Turns out the problem was not specifically the GPT nature of the partiiton (although that would have become a problem).  The Adaptec driver required updating.  Using the 2008-10-06 driver, and the amd64 one in particular was exactly what the doctor ordered.  In the process of troubleshooting, I wiped the whole array and started from scratch, which proved useful getting up and running quicker with a full 3.4TB.  Yippee…

Will add a few more 750B drives later this week, we’ll see how long the capacity expansion happens after that…  Adaptec 31605 seems to show consistent lengthy times for OCE, one of the biggest disadvantages to this card

In the end, two big bites.  Ouch.

I spent a bit of time yesterday programming against the RFXCom reciever. The C# TcpClient class gets things up and running extremely quickly. In much same way as interacting with files (FileStream, StreamWriter), you can create a instance of a System.Net.Sockets.TcpClient, get a System.Net.Sockets.NetworkStream, and go to town with reading and writing of data off the socket.

It seems there are a few issues folks have encountered with Big vs. Little endian when sending/recieving messages across different platforms, this will not be as important a consideration for me, but something to keep in mind if you step down to this lower level.

What I’ve noticed in the stream from the RFXCom thus far is that there is no delimtter between messages, and I appear to be reading some incomplete bytes resulting in a few corrupt messages.  I believe this is likely due to a read occuring when a byte isn’t fully populated.  I plan to verify this by using the return value of the Read method (returns an integer representing bytes read) as I don’t expect to have instances where I am only reading a single byte.

Bert (and others) have done a tremendous job with documenting the device, but there isn’t enough information out there on direct socket programming to know exactly what to expect out of the device interactions.

My plan is to log the recieved messages along with date/time stamps into a SQL table that will be used as a message pump to a processing engine that will interpret the data, and push to a web service aggregator.  I’m hoping to avoid the Lantronix middleware that maps the RFXCom IP to a local virtual serial port, which would make my package a little smaller, and easier to re-dist.

I’ve got the basis for my home automation logging established now, and was pleased to get an e-mail from Oregon Scientific indicating my temperature sensor order shipped!!! Of course the e-mail had little value, as it arrived 30 minutes after I got back from the post office with the sensors in hand I ended up buying direct as it was the best price (and got 15% off with webthx09). Picked up:

I put the UV sensor outside: suprise, it says low. I’ve got the wine fridge, garage rack, and office adding data on top of the weather station and hot tub sensor.

Moved the RFXCom to a more central location as well, as the wine fridge was reducing the range of the temp sensor.

With three of each sensor type I made sure to use channel 1 through 3 for each type. It seems entirely possible to overlap, but association with the data collection service I am going to build would require more logic to differentiate sensors (according to Bert’s work on decoding the random bits set per reset of a device).

I love Friday. It is deeply intertwined with my love of beer, I assure you. This week has gone by especially fast, like my computer, I’m sure it is the anti-histamines.  Anyways, typical Friday afternoon meeting with Kevin scheduled, will meet up at Redhook to cover the mortgage and housing industry updates, plans for the next home brews, his kids growth progress, and of course, Redhook brews in my sub 100 number mug and his over 200 mugÂ

And I registered TGIFrikkinF.com.  33 and counting.

UMR was extremely generous with his time and his second XEON CPU this week, with a little nudging we got the beast running. Slick piece of hardware, the highlight being the Adaptec “Cylon” lighting on the RAID card. It took almost a full 24 hours to build out a 4 drive RAID 6 array, I have scheduled 3 additional drives to be added starting around 1AM. In the short time before that arrives I’ve begun the consolidation from physical to virtual. PDIDDY is 46% of the way through conversion, and will soon be retired as a physical entity.

VMC will have her media content moved over to the array over the next couple of days and will soon join PDIDDY in the has been crowd.

Even with a single CPU this system is EXTREMELY responsive, it could be the 12GB of RAM, the mad I/O throughput, or maybe my anti-histamines. Yay spring.

Worth noting: Supermicro has a great support staff (on top of great products), they have my vote, and my business.  Thanks Mike H and DL.

If you’re a beer brewer, at some point you have to have considered what would happen if you took some of your raw materials and went one step (or a couple steps) further and produced a distilled spirit. That’s what the good folks over at Rogue have been doing for several years, wth a recent addition of a whiskey (Dead Guy Whiskey)to their line-up. I’m happy to announce that it is FINALLY available in the greater Seattle area, most notably at the Issaquah Liquor store.

 

 

Great review at realbeer.com.

I’m working through my second bottle, and enjoying every last drop.