Downtime and new UPS

Sorry for the downtime guys, the update to baselayout 2 on Farragut wasn’t as easy as expected, I have some talk to do with Roy about it ;)

Now, this is probably going to be the fourth night I’m not gonna sleep well, today I had a support request to take care of in the afternoon and I was supposed to go out with a few friends tonight, but I was so tired that I started having fever, so I had to get a raincheck for that.

The good news is that I received the new UPS, an APC SmartUPS 1000VA, that seems to be able to take enterprise and farragut up for 1 hour and a quarter, which is quite good (the other UPS would take the monitors and the network equipment up for also an hour, which is not bad, and should cover most of short-time non-planned outages.

Unfortunately, if you have followed me for a while, you know there’s no flawless hardware acquisition for me; this time the problem comes from the software needed to control the two UPSes; please note that there are two.

First of all, when I started using an UPS, I used apcupsd but then I moved to nut because it had a decent graphical control software (knutclient); what was the problem with this? Well, nut was confused by the two UPSes, that being both APC, shares the same identical vendor and product ID for the USB device. So it was not a nice thing.

I’ve then decided to come back to apcupsd, but the latest version is not in portage (again) so I bumped it locally with the patch on Bugzilla, and added a gnome useflag for the graphical control utility that is now present. This version is important to me, not only because of the utility, but also because with this version is possible to choose the configuration file at runtime, as it’s not hardcoded during build.

This is also important because in previous versions the only way to have more than one UPS being monitored on the same box with apcupsd required to have two different builds on different places. What I want to do now is to rewrite the init script so that it is multiplexed (like rbot, mt-daapd, openvpn and so on), that way I can simply start two apcupsd instances to have all I need (note that one of them won’t be shutting off my box at all, as it would just keep monitoring the UPS that is actually connected to the monitors and networking.

Once Baselayout 2 is more functional on Farragut, I’ll probably move apcupsd instances there, and network it down here, it would be safer on the long run as enterprise might not be up when farragut is.

I still haven’t been able to finish working on rbot’s changes I need, sigh. And don’t get me started on xine-lib, I’m taking a few days off because what I found myself working on now is a veeery bad thing I’m afraid…. (bit per sample transcoding during output).

Planned downtime

Just so you (my readers) know, tomorrow my server will be down between 11am and 4pm because of a planned blackout in my area. I do have UPSs, but Farragut’s one only lasts about 40 minutes, and the one keeping the router up will only last about the same time.

I’ll have (limited) mail access through my phone, for the rest I’ll be reading my books :)

Unplanned downtime

So, since last night my blog was mostly down, till this late afternoon.

For the ones missing it, it was due to the nano-hurricane we had here last night, for sure not to the level that Americans are used to, but more of a storm than we usually have here. At my house we didn’t get major damages but there is now a broken tent, and a lot of branches fell from the trees here around.

With all that happened (and it was bad, with that icy rain), the power company left us without power for 3 hours, which isn’t bad considering the fell trees and so on.. in a not-so-distant town they were without power for the whole night till morning.

But with the cooler night, after two weeks of hot, too hot nights (unfortunately, only on the literal temperature sense ;P), I literally fell asleep before the power was up again, and I slept so well till 8am. At that point, although I did take up the server again, I forgot to run ddclient till afternoon, because I was occupied helping a friend of mine setting up her new laptop (how many times did you see the pre-installed software containing a trojan horse?).

Anyway, farragut is now back up, hopefully for long still, as I’m going away next month as I told, and it would be bad if I have to fix it :/

And for a few unexpected circumstances, I’m afraid I won’t have a new job too soon, meaning I’m probably not going to upgrade the CPU here :(

And more on a Gentoo note, I’ve today removed my im.gentoo.org account from Kopete, as lately I was having lots of trouble, wasn’t it enough annoying to put the password in three times before getting a login. Now I”ll be using Google Talk server as my only Jabber acocunt.