klein2 blog

AngelBeats! エンジェルビーツ!

Dennis Klein — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:55:20 +0000

This time, I wanted to write about something different than IT. What’s a good topic? Of course animé!

We’ve seen through Boston Legal and Bones (until the latest dubbed episode) and wanted to see a animé series after a long time. The last animé series we’ve seen were Elfen Lied, Steel Angel Kurumi und Sister Princess awesome animés that I recommend, but maybe not Elfen Lied for children below 16. I’ve also started watching Serial Experiments LAIN, but I stopped after episode 5 and couldn’t motivate myself to start over – so far!

We had to decide between A-Channel and AngelBeats! – well, it was a matter of available subs and the first few minutes were very promising – funny but also the typical end-time environment.

Story & characters

Life is over, all characters are dead. The series is playing in the afterworld, or at least in a pre-stage of that. When Otonashi wakes up, he’s laying on the floor, outside, in front of him knees Yuri with a machine gun in her hands and is pointing it to someone, an angel. Yuri is the lead of Shinda Sekai Sensen (死んだ世界戦線), an organization who is against Angel or god. The bad thing about the afterworld is, that all dead are pupil in a school, who are writing exams and if they do what they should so, someday they will dissolve. Noone knows where they will go, but the members of Shinda Sekai Sensen believe that they would be reborn as a lower life form like a water flea. Noone is able to die in the afterworld, they will return to this place when they died after a short time and are ready for new adventures. Also there, noone wants to die – it hurts a lot.

The good & the bad

Typical for japanese animé, there are no clear “good” and “bad”. Angel, for example, was absolutely bad in the first 3 episodes that we’ve seen so far, but when I look at images on the web, it looks like that will change.

Language & length of the series

There’s a german translation (and for sure also an english one), but we prefer to see the japanese version with subs, because it’s more fun to hear the japanese voices.

The series contains 13 episodes, unfortunately just these small amount of them, but that’s typical for current series. One episode is about 25 minutes.

Our tip: Watch!

Weather Station Process Diagram

Dennis Klein — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:50:15 +0000

I was asked several times how the weather station works. I thought, it would be a nice idea to create a process diagram (which you can see above). Here’s a more detailed, written, description.

It all starts with the instruments. They are mounted to our shelter and are equipped with a wireless transmitter.

Inside the living room, the station itself (a touchscreen LCD display with a USB port) sits on top of a rack and is connected via USB to a thin client.

The thin client runs Debian and the wslogger.pl. wslogger.pl is launched every 5 minutes by a cronjob, captures the data and stores them into a file. A small (lighttp) web server is installed on the system.

Inside the datacenter, I run a virtual machine, a “JiffyBox”. It’s also running Debian and grabs the content of the local file every 5 minutes using the tool curl. It writes them to the end of a log file and also creates a txt file which is available for you to use and work with.

I run a bunch of cronjobs on the web server to process the data. The first one uses awk to scan the last line in the log file and put these data into the MySQL database. The script creates a SQL file which will be put into the database in the next step. Then, it will be deleted to avoid multiple entries. This data is shown in the table on the website.

Another part is the creation of the graphs. A script which calls other self created scripts checks the data from the log file and add new records to the rrd database files, followed by the command to create a current PNG file for the last 24h’s, 1 week, 1 month and 1 year.

Jens’ script checks on a 5 minute base for weather warnings of the DWD (Deutscher Wetter Dienst). I use their next station, which is located in Wesel. It creates a file containing the word “false” if there are no warnings and a regular HTML file containing the details if there is a warning. The index.php files shows the warning only if the content is NOT false

The last part of the puzzle is the brand new Twitter account, that I’ve created. It’s @MoerserWetter and will receive updates about the current weather conditions in a 30 minutes loop. Weather warnings will also be captured and run in 1h loop. To describe it in a short way: the twitter scripts are working like the database entry script; the SQL syntax will be put into a SQL file which will then be imported into the database, but this time into the ctrltweet database, which is running on the same server. There is no need for an API.

Home Office page updated

Dennis Klein — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:15:54 +0000

Just FYI, my dear loyal readers – I’ve updated the Home Office site tonight! Enjoy!

ESXi DirectPath I/O problem

Dennis Klein — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:55:23 +0000

So I played with the ESXi server last night and for some reason I wanted to put the onboard USB controllers to PCI passthrough (DirectPath I/O). Bad idea!

The result is, that the I couldn’t access the setup via IPMI2.0 and even worse: all USB passthrough devices are no longer working.

No problem, I thought – I went to the settings on my Win XP VM which is running vSphere client and removed the checks in the shown above window. Reboot.

For my surprise, the devices where still there. I tried this 4 or 5 times. No success. Damn!

I was looking for a solution on Google, but without success. What I found is a little workaround. I guess I need to reinstall the ESXi onto the USB stick, but at the moment, I’m not in the mood.

The workaround put’s the devices back from the passthrough mode to the vmkernel. This works – until I have to reboot (luckily this system runs for months w/o a reboot). What you need is SSH access to the ESXi server.

Here’s my script that I’ve put into the root folder and made it accessible:

# cat clean
#!/bin/sh
vmkchdev -v 000:000:26.0
vmkchdev -v 000:000:29.0

# chmod +x clean
# ./clean

That’s all! Now I am able to remove the devices and can go on and use the USB devices.

Until the next reboot – this will work.

This is a workaround! Not a solution! So if anybody of my readers knows a better way – please – let me know!

PS. I’ve spend 2 1/2h’s on this crap – I wanted to use the time to finish the cabling on “Home Office 8.2″ and take some photos

Gateway & Weather Data Collector upgraded

Dennis Klein — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:32:41 +0000

In the last couple of days, I saw Debian having issues with the ext2 filesystem on the Gateway/Weather Data Collector box sometimes. I want this system to run as smooth as possible, so I bought (2) of these IDE 2GB SSDs (one for each Futro system).

Last night, I installed the first one in the future pfSense router – a bit soldering was needed – but I had no issues with this process. So, today I removed the gateway… ah.. it’s called Mumble, ok? So I powered down Mumble and put it into the basement to install the other SSD. Here are some photos that I’ve taken.

The weather data is now available on http://wetter.klein2.net!

Weather Station Online

Dennis Klein — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 12:40:02 +0000

On my last post, I have shown some photos of the new weather station. In the last week, I mounted the instruments to the shelter in the garden and created a dynamic web application. It was my goal to enable this on my home network, the web server is a Debian Linux, running on my home ESXi server.

I’m still having some trouble with the rain detector, or better explained: with the perl script. There is a workaround, but I would love to have it perfect – so it will maybe take some weeks until this will work, too.

Today (Saturday, January 14th), I will reinstall the Debian System onto a 2GB IDE SSD that I will install into the Gateway/weather data capture system, which means it will be offline for some hours. I will post a link to the site later

Here are some recently captured & rendered weather data stats:

Ciao
Dennis

Weather station & grabbing data via Linux

Dennis Klein — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:28:51 +0000

Yesterday, I’ve written about the 2 Fujitsu-Siemens Futros that I plan to use in my network environment. Today, I received the weather station which (as always – but this time in a very good way) changes the way it will work in future.

The station itself was put together quickly. There are 2 parts; one are the instruments that you can see above. It is equipped with a small solar panel which powers them. There is also a 2x AA battery slot (I guess for the night and darker days).

The second part is the station itself. It is a very handy touchscreen LCD panel with a USB port. A 2x USB A cable was in the package and so it was pretty easy to connect it to a PC.

Until I have time to mount the instruments at the shelter, I’ve put them into flower bed in the garden – for a test run.

Luckily, the weather station connects the instruments to the station wireless. This allows me to drop the idea to install one of the Futros into the shelter. I simply put my gateway into the living room which is in optical range to the instruments.

To grab the data, I use Steve’s perl script. It took some time to get it installed, but that was the “fault” of a wrong /etc/apt/sources.list file In the end, I was able to grab data from the station in a 10 seconds (or more often I really want) delay. This will allow me to write these data with a little cron job into a file on the fileserver and then grab this file from another VM and create a nice rrdtool graphic out of it – but this task will be done in (near) future

Here’s a screenshot of some data coming in.

I guess, now that I have one box unused, I will end up building a pfSense router with the Dual Port NIC + the onboard NIC for load balancing my two DSL lines

↔ The Gateway Project – Hardware + a secret

Dennis Klein — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:23:05 +0000

While moving all the eMail from one server to the other (my old server will be shut down by January 22nd – but this site is already on the new one), I received a package via UPS. Inside: 2x PCI-X Dual Port Intel cards. Yeah – PCI-X. I don’t have any PCI-X ports in one of my systems, but I was told it will work fine in a standard 3.3V PCI port

So I opened up the gateway box and installed it. To be honest, I never thought it would fit – I had bought the cards for the fileserver (one + 1 spare), but was too curious if it would work in the small gateway. As you can see on the following photos, it fits – and Debian lists the card as 2x Intel 82546EB ethernet ports (lspic & ifconfig assigned it to eth1 & eth2 (eth0 is the onboard NIC).

I got a second Fujitsu-Siemens Futro! Yeah! For just 20€ This one received the new 4GB CF card I bought last week and it will run Debian, too. This box will be awesome! While the first one will run as gateway in the house, this cutie will be put into the shelter.

“Why?” I see you asking. From the family, I’ve got a bit Xmas money and instead of buy expensive stuff (like lovely Animé figures (oh it’s hard to resist – believe me)), I decided to get what I’ve written on every single wish list for the last (at least) 5 years. A weather station! But not a display that you put and your desk and you’re done. No! This one will have own instruments. I’ve chosen the WH 1080, because it has great Linux support. I will use it the same way I use the internal sensors (shown in a blog post some weeks ago), a little perl script will grab the data from the sensors and print it into file(s). rrdtool and a cronjob will create graphs from this source. I can’t await to get my hands on this

However – here are 2 more photos from the “dream team”.

All photos are available in HiRes at flickr.

Anatomy of my ESXi server – Part II

Dennis Klein — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:52:00 +0000

Every computer here in my office is not really a static construction. Some things quickly change – and it’s pretty hard to keep up with forum signatures for example A server should not be changed often – in this case, it was a minor software-based change – but with a very nice effect.

I was running my first VMs on the NFS share from the half-virtualized Debian Fileserver. That was working well – but could be faster. So I decided to simply plug my 3x 640GB HD SFF-8087 from the HP SAS Expander to the RAIDable other Intel/LSI controller and create a RAID10e of it. RAID10e is a funny RAID that allows you to use also 3,5,7 etc. HDs as a Mirror. As result, I’ve got a ~900GB RAID10e storage that is luckily recognized by ESXi (the controller itself is supported). This is a very fast storage for my VMs. I still use my 2.5″ drives in the server to store the ISOs on. Of course, I could do this also on the NFS share, but to have a copy of them is a good idea.

As the big storage on the half-virtualized fileserver is about 10TB, I don’t really care to create a TimeMachine space there. There’s really enough free space and doing this is on my very long “ToDo” list. At the moment, I’m restoring my data from the backup server back to the fileserver using “curlftpfs” – that is a very nice FUSE add-on for Linux which allows you to rsync files from a FTP share (you mount it like a drive, a Samba share…). I now receive the files at ~120MB/s.

The backup server will receive a new network card – I found a Dual Port Intel PCI-X card (HP labeled) for just 9€. The board does not have a full PCI-X slot, but I was told that it will work, even if it’s a regular PCI slot. At this price, I bought 2 of these cards – one for the gateway – that would allow me to create a nice pfsense router from a Futro (I will get a second one tomorrow ) – so one for gateway + one for router. I just hope the card is not too long – otherwise I need to cut the case a bit…

Blog moved

Dennis Klein — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 17:34:15 +0000

One of my current projects (and believe me – there are way too much for the spare few days of holidays) was to move my blog to a new server. Instead spending 50€ every month to an ISP with very poor service and ugly slow response times, I decided to book a “JiffyBox“. I’ve installed it today and I’m very impressed with the speed of it. Well – my blog is the first site which moved over – so: Welcome