Done the past few days (20110329 Tu - 0401 Fr)

( raw notes )

A very productive four days at work, having gotten over last weekend's case of the plague. I even went out for a walk on Thursday. Still nowhere near back in shape, and not exercising nearly enough. But the walk felt good, and I realized that my mood must depend more on the weather than I thought. Not so much hours of sunlight -- if the SAD light's having an effect it's a subtle one -- as whether it's sunny or gloomy during the daytime. Hmm.

Friday also represented the end of an era at work, as Peter Hart stepped down as Chairman of RII on the 20th anniversary of his start date there. He's the one who hired me 18 years ago. It also makes me the oldest person in the company. Ouch!

I found it oddly liberating Wednesday morning when LJ was down with its DDOS. Suddenly there was time to putter, mostly downloading lyrics for Tempered Glass. Hmm.

The power outage yesterday evening was somewhat helpful in terms of puttering, and I found myself making salad and shrimp by LED light. Power came back in time for me to zap the cauliflower. It then took an hour or so for the fileserver to fsck itself, which was annoying.

Large partitions ought to be fsck'ed on a regular schedule, I guess. Especially the one that hangs off the router -- the last thing I need is that taking half an hour to come back! More on that in a separate post upwhen.

A decent collection of links under the cut, as usual. Check out the World's Largest indoor Photo: Strahov Philosophical Library, Prague - 40 Gigapixel 360 Panorama. Try not to drool on your keyboard.

Power outage

There was a power outage yesterday evening at the Starport; no harm done, but it triggered some thoughts. Here's the raw data:

  : UPS battery life on nova is under 15min.  That's miserable.  
    stargate:  107min,  5.0% of 865W = 44W  (includes DSL router, switches) 
    nova:       13min, 16.9% of 260W = 44W  Oh.  (varies down to 33)
    trantor:	70min,  9.0% of 780W = 70W
    CPAP rated at 48W, but hopefully uses less -> 30 open; 6 idle  Eeep!  
      That's maybe 3h on its XS1500 UPS.  The alarm had better wake me up!

Ok, so there are two obvious problems here. The first is that Nova, the fileserver, has a miserable uptime. That's not so bad, since the network is perfectly usable without it as long as all you want to do is surf. The other is that my CPAP, which is on the same kind of UPS as stargate (the router) has a much higher power consumption than I thought. The battery wouldn't last the night. Which means that I would probably die in my sleep if the power went out. Not so good.

There are two less obvious problems: Nova's disk took over an hour to fsck. That's a long time to boot, but not not too bad because, as I mentioned, the file server isn't all that essential in the short term. What's more of a problem is the backup drive on stargate. I really don't want my router taking half an hour to boot.

I also discovered that my wireless phone base station is on its own UPS, a 500VA APC that beeps when the power goes out. One of the thing I really like about the XS series is that you can turn the power-fail alarm off. Great in the office. Not so great for the CPAP!

So the current plan is to move the bedroom UPS into the office for Nova, and for the short term move Nova's SmartUPS 420 into the bedroom. Because it beeps. Eventually I'll want something bigger.

I also want to put the big partitions on a once-a-week unmount / fsck / remount routine. Easy. Along with that I want to move the router to a 2.25" drive (which I just happen to have sitting around) for lower power consumption. (I'd rather move the router to a solid-state drive and make the laptop drive external. But that will have to wait.)

ETA: I just found a stack of unpaid bills including this month's energy bill -- 28.2KWh/day, as opposed to 35.1 last year, so a little under a 20% improvement. (The gas bill was 63% more, but we won't go into that. yet.)

ETA: (0403) Actual measurement on the CPAP shows that it uses between 6 and 12 W in normal operation, so the XS1500 will keep it running all night, barely. That's encouraging. May keep things as they are for a while.