This entry isn’t to announce that I’ve managed to do that; it’s the complete opposite.

I’ve found that Zenfolio has come on a long way since I looked at it a year ago.  The Zenfolio service offers custom theming, order fulfillment, password protection, digital licensing and more.  I could, in time, write my own code to do this, but I’m coming to the realisation that I just don’t have the energy, nor skill, to write my dream system.  I could probably get my programming up to the skill level required to do it properly, but the time I’d spend doing that could be spent listening to live music or processing photos from a gig so that I can attempt to earn a little pocket money from them.

I think I’ll take the live music and pocket money.  I get plenty of chances to excercise my coding streak at work.

So simple, and now I have full visibility of the fans and temperatures on the host server.

Went looking for some Powerline carrier modules, and settled on the Belkin 200 Mbps model (though I paid less than that link).  The pair arrived today, and took all of 2 minutes to hook up.  No hiccups at all, no software required (there is software, but I can’t think what it might do that would be useful to me).

Now all I need is a 2-way or 3-way power block for downstairs so I can remove the long extension cable, and then the additional phone cabling and it’ll look a lot neater.

Today can thus be classified as a good day, even if it did involve a bug that caused a Catalyst 5500 core switch to crash, taking out our entire network.

Cisco support wiki on said bug.

The hookup is fairly easy – insert two batteries into the device, open the meter cabinet outside, and clamp an inductance sensor around the live tail going to the consumer unit.  Then power up the inside metering device, pair the two devices up, and get an instant reading as to how much juice the house is consuming.

So, what did I find out?

Well, my house is fairly energy efficient when it comes to electricity.  The optimal base load of the house is probably somewhere around 240 to 300 Wh (Watt-hours), assuming I turn all my electrical devices, except the fridge, off.  The maximum instant draw I could incur is in the region of 17 kW, or 408 kWh in terms of base load (which is measured across a 24-hour period).  Assuming electricity costs me 12 pence per kWh (and that’s not far off), my optimal base load costs me 2.88 pence per day.  Running a full load would cost me almost £50 a day, but I can’t think of why I’d want to run all my devices for 24 hours.

However, I said optimal base load.  My current base load is actually more like 2.88 kWh (120 Watts/hour), so the cost of the base load is 34.56 pence per day, or about 12 times what the optimal base load would cost.  Achieving the optimal base load isn’t hard – I just have to turn off the TV+Freeview+Stereo from standby (which will upset the Freeview box), and throw the mains switch for the router, Vonage device and gigabit switch.

So, what does my device consumption look like?

• Shower – 7.8 kW on ‘hot’, 5.5 kW on ‘medium’.  Pressure on medium is a bit better than hot, but definitely not as warm.
• Kettle – 2 kW
• Oven – 2.2 kW when heating
• Washing machine – 2.4 kW
• Microwave – 1.2 kW
• Fridge – spikes about 200 W when running the compressor
• Computer – 200 W
• Various halogen lights – 700 W with all of them on.

So, for summer showers, I can probably get away with the medium setting.  It’s a little cool, but I can live with that.  I already try to only turn the halogen lights on if I have to – they’re definitely not cheap to run compared to the various energy efficient 7 W sunlight bulbs that I have in other light fittings.  It looks like there are energy-efficient bulbs that can replace halogens though, so I’ll have to get some to test compatability with the sockets.  My calculations say that I should end up using 4.5 times less energy for an equivalent light output.

Time to go save a bit more money – my current daily usage is close to £1/day.  With a bit of fiddling, bulb replacement, and turning things off, I should be able to shave a good chunk of that off.

The first driver tested was the ipw3945 from the Intel sourceforge site. This is the one that requires the binary-blob regulatory daemon that supposedly does way more than Intel claim it does (there’s a BSD driver for the same card, and the author reckons that the daemon has things like signal strength algorithms etc built in). This driver could find the card, but I could never get a link to the access point. Using wpa_supplicant gave me:

Removed BSSID 00:03:6f:95:45:88 from blacklist

State: ASSOCIATED -> COMPLETED

CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to 00:03:6f:95:45:88 completed (reauth)

Wireless event: cmd=0x8b15 len=20

Wireless event: new AP: 00:00:00:00:00:00

Setting scan request: 0 sec 100000 usec

Added BSSID 00:03:6f:95:45:88 into blacklist

State: COMPLETED -> DISCONNECTED

Yes, somehow, the driver or wpa_supplicant decided to blacklist the very access point that it was configured to talk to. That’s not very useful. Then there was the need to remove the ieee80211 module as well, and reload it, otherwise I got lots of wonderful errors like “ipw3945: Unknown symbol alloc_ieee80211“. That’s understandable though, because the module got updated, and had to be reloaded.

The second driver to be tested was the iwlwifi driver – again an Intel project. This one doesn’t have the regulatory daemon, but does have a firmware microcode. Not a problem, the various third-party repositories have copies of all of this, pre-built in RPM format (ATrpms in this case, and it’s 20 tiny versions behind the Intel release). Download, install, try to load.

mac80211: Unknown symbol ieee80211_led_rx

Ah, very useful. Missing symbols in the ieee80211 module. The problem is, where I got the mac80211 module from doesn’t seem to have a newer ieee80211 module with the appropriate symbols. I don’t need the LEDs to work, but there’s no trivial way to override missing symbols. This, therefore, means I can’t see if the iwlwifi driver actually works.

Finally, the solution that actually gets iwconfig to show ‘associated’ is to use ndiswrapper. I really didn’t want to go this route, but if it works, then it works and solves an outstanding ticket in my queue. I grabbed the Dell driver from the ndiswrapper wiki link. Unfortunately, it only half works. wpa_supplicant is able to find the card and drive the requests (using wext as the card type, not ndiswrapper, go figure), but watching iwconfig shows that the card is constantly losing the association with the access point, and eventually gives up the ghost. Ping tests show about 20% packet loss (and the AP is less than 50 feet away), with ping times in the 500ms to 5000ms range.

wpa_supplicant goes into spam loops too:

May 19 16:46:58.397419: State: COMPLETED -> ASSOCIATED

May 19 16:46:58.397447: Associated with 00:03:6f:95:45:88

May 19 16:46:58.397458: WPA: Association event - clear replay counter

May 19 16:46:58.397468: EAPOL: External notification - portEnabled=0

May 19 16:46:58.397477: EAPOL: SUPP_PAE entering state DISCONNECTED

May 19 16:46:58.397487: EAPOL: SUPP_BE entering state INITIALIZE

May 19 16:46:58.397505: EAPOL: External notification - portValid=0

May 19 16:46:58.397524: EAPOL: External notification - portEnabled=1

May 19 16:46:58.397533: EAPOL: SUPP_PAE entering state S_FORCE_AUTH

May 19 16:46:58.397542: EAPOL: SUPP_BE entering state IDLE

May 19 16:46:58.397557: Cancelling authentication timeout

May 19 16:46:58.397567: State: ASSOCIATED -> COMPLETED

May 19 16:46:58.397578: CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to 00:03:6f:95:45:88 completed (reauth)

Not very useful. It also appears that it just caused the laptop to lock up when called from kNetworkManager. Wonderful.

We have Exchange 2003 – it’s not bad once it’s had all of the service packs applied. We also, until today, managed our meeting rooms on a bit of paper. This morning, the request came through to investigate the use of Exchange as a meeting room management tool; shouldn’t be too hard to do really, and it isn’t.

1. Create a new Active Directory user, and stick it in a service account OU.
2. Assign the user a rather long password, it’s only going to be used on occasion.
3. Create a mail profile for Outlook, and log in to the meeting room account.
4. Configure the account to automatically accept meetings and cancellations, and also provide conflict detection. Oh, don’t forget the rights for Authors and Editors (create/edit own and edit all respectively).
5. Log back in to a regular Exchange account, and schedule a meeting, with the meeting room as an invited attendee.
6. Remember to throw the flag that says the meeting room user is actually a resource. Every. Single. Time.

It’s step 6 that gets me – why can’t I tell Active Directory, and thus Exchange, that I want a new object of type resource, rather than new object of type user? Why do I have to remember to change that flag for that user every time?

Argh.

This morning, I had reason to thank the gods of RAID – one of my drives died last night, and I didn’t lose a bit of data (hah, a pun!).

So, one RMA raised, and I have to hope that the other drive doesn’t decide to follow in the footsteps of its brother.  Perhaps I should get two more 500 GB drives and run RAID5 with hot-spare…

Oh, and an LTO drive.

SASL gave me grief, as it usually does.  I’m not sure whether it was the plain or md5 SASL extension that solved my problem in the end (I’m using MySQL as the backend via auxprop), but it finally started working after installing both of them.  Before that, I was getting a wonderful “warning: xsasl_cyrus_server_get_mechanism_list: no applicable SASL mechanisms” from Postfix, which then promptly declared that it was having nothing to do with me and went off in a huff.

With the SASL issue solved, everything else was a breeze – I just imported my old configuration for Postfix, amending it where things had changed (variable name wise).  I had to use SJ Mudd’s RPM package, as the default CentOS packages don’t know what MySQL is as a dictionary type, but beyond having to compile my own package, it was painless.  Courier compiled nicely into RPMs, and is happily chatting to the data source that ties together my valid accounts for SMTP and IMAP.  TLS is all integrated nicely, webmail is running, DNS is changed.

Bet something breaks!

Gutsy broke this. Bug reports show it broken in Tribe 4 and Tribe 5, so I’m surprised it made it into the release version (which has even had updates released). This was an upgrade installation, so I’ll have to poke around with a fresh installation to see if it’s just an upgrade issue.