Somebody managed to snap off the FC to SAS adapter in the back of a set of disk drawers on the SAN. So I cam up with this special tool. =P

I scored this cool little compressor - something I've been missing in the shed for a while now.

Should make a bunch of jobs much easier.

Here is what the power does when you turn on two chassis worth of MicoCloud servers. Click the photo to see other power graphs (turning off an IBM chassis full of HS21s.)

Looks like a trip down to the DC soon to rack up these new drawers. Netapp DS2248. 24x 900G x 4. 86.4TB raw. Drooooool... 

Looool $34.98. Tell 'im he's dreamin...

The kids begged Mummy last week to drag this car off the council strip from up the road. The battery is stuffed and it only goes in reverse (switch stuffed). I've replaced the reversing switch with a relay - all it needs now is a battery and it's good to go.

Random Elasticsearch fact: When running Elasticsearch from within openvz containers - make sure that you give them veth devices rather than just IP addresses. Otherwise zen discovery will not work.

Proxmox is working out great as a home server. I have many small containers performing various tasks - all with puppet managed config.

This makes it much easier to manage and buildup/teardown when experimenting with different things. Much easier than the previous setup which was one monolithic server which had all the services on it.

When working in IT, you often accumulate a lot of hard drives. Here is a box of drives which are going to my mate for scrap. He collects the aluminium and magnets from them.

4 Digit Nixie Display prototype is running with the basics without the BCD-10 (4028) and Shift Register (4094) fitted for multiplexing. Running all anodes on for testing.

Unfortunately the previous NPN transistors which I grabbed to drive the bases of the PNP transistors which control the tube anodes were too small. The leakage from emitter to base on the pnp transistors was more than they could handle. Consequently the 4000 series CMOS chips got nuked too =/ I had no throughhole replacements, so I settled on some SMD transistors which I had stashed rated at 400V. No chance of them breaking down. I will also be addding some opto-isolators too...

I was given an old tube based high voltage power supply. It looks a bit dodgey - so I'm going to scrap it for parts. There were two nice 150V argon voltage regulation tubes in it though (OD3). There is a potted high voltage transformer module which gives a nice range of taps 425V at 100mA and also a 5V 2A tap for heaters. I will probably end up using this potted module as the basis for a bench supply (A much less scary, much more insulated one).

Today I built a chisel sharpening jig loosly based on John Heisz' design, without the trimmings. It turned out pretty well. Fixed 30 degree bevel, not adjustable. Two of the chisels were pretty far gone, so I ran them on the belt sander first to get the bulk of the material removed. This also fixed the leading edge and made it square again.

I've been implementing logstash at work. Interesting stuff. The elasticsearch cluster is up and running and working great. There isn't really anything to give it a really solid workout with just yet. I have been feeding it about 3000 lines a day worth of power data which I am graphing with Kibana, but that's about it. For starters I've got 180-odd machine cluster which I am going to be reading logs from with the logstash agent and sending them over to elasticsearch. There will be a redis cluster sitting between elasticsearch and the logstash agents. I decided to implement two haproxy/keepalived setups with floating IPs for the Elasticsearch and for the redis cluster. I went with this because although Elasticsearch takes care of this by it's self normally, some code does not handle being given more than one IP or hostname to contact Elasticsearch with, the same goes for the redis. So floating IPs will solve this, it will also mean that I can add more nodes and not touch the config on either the logstash agent or on the logstash redis/elasticsearch boxes. I can't wait to try it out, the individual bits are all happy and some of the parts which can communicate are tested. Currently I'm waiting on changes and approvals and stuff to go through so I can open up the required ports and install the logstash agents.

A roof space adventure! I had to get into the ceiling to investigate a noise we were hearing, which sounded like it was coming from in the ceiling. Of course this noise is intermittant and did not occur after all the effort of getting into the roof. I had to cut a piece of pine to fit across the bath tub to hold the ladder up under the manhole. It's in a really stupid spot (see photos). During the investigation I also discovered another reason why the airconditioning performs so poorly in this house. It appears that rather than getting a new AC plant when the house was extended, the owners simply bodged on another duct. I mean bodged, The main outlet to the airco is a trapezium shape with two ducts coming out like normal. They have just cut a hole in the top face and bodged another outlet on - the cutout is still sitting on top of the unit. I may modify this later, it's crap, you have to run every outlet all the time, there is no day/night modes to switch between bedrooms and living areas. I also discovered that there is a massive water heater in the ceiling too.

Finishing up the last day of Puppet training today in the city. It's been good to get a better understanding of how to start out from scratch and fill in a lot of gaps in fundamental knowledge which I missed being self taught. At work I help maintain existing modules, but rarely write new modules - so this is great. Another cool tool for the toolbox.

Racked up an interesting bit of kit today. Very nice in deed. Supermicro Microcloud 5037MR-H8TRF. This beastie fits eight E5-2600 v2 based systems into just 3U height. The units that we have currently are fitted with 32GB of RAM, but can take up to 128GB. The additional dual gigabit ethernet modules were removed and dual 10G SFP+ adapters were fitted. Each blade also has IPMI and the ability to directly plug in KVM (via dongle). They look awesome. The front of the chassis contains 16 3.5" drives. Two disks per blade. Click the thumbnail for more images.

Today I made a compact "gaming station" to get the kids off the main TV. They can play the Wii and the Playstation on this unit. It also contains all the games and crap that go along with the consoles. It is made from an old baby change table which I basically cut in half on the table saw. It uses a TV screen with AV in which a mate gave me. A quick win for not much work.

Triple Screen ASCIIquarium =)

Swich from eBay arrived today. Pretty good score - less than $100. 48 Port gigabit managed switch. HP 2848. Judging by the box it came it, it was ex-auction (grays online or something) and had never been used. The "refer to guide" sticker was still over the power inlet. W00t.

Just finished implementing a postgres backed powerdns system for internal dns including slony replication to a remote node which also has powerdns on it. I wrote some python which I hooked into the dhcpd commit, release and expire events that creates forward and reverse DNS entries for specific ranges of DHCP when leases are given and removes them when they expire or when they are released. The records are created with 60 second TTLs, so it seems to work pretty well. I got tired of editing bind files, now I can make DNS changes programatically or in a web GUI like poweradmin or something. There are also a bunch of new sub domains for lab, esx, vpn and proxmox hosts which are easier to manage now.

Setting up current version of yum Postgres on CentOS machines...

rpm -Uvh http://yum.pgrpms.org/9.3/redhat/rhel-6-x86_64/pgdg-centos93-9.3-1.noarch.rpm</p>
<p>yum install postgresql93-server --enablerepo=pgdg93