Go dick go
Huh… go figure, he sounds sane here….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YENbElb5-xY
Linux 342
An IBM 342 with a ServeRAID 4lx is a fine machine, but getting Linux to install is less the effortless. Emacs!
I’m trying to get zoneminder to work on this very nice IBM 342 with a serve raid card and some good drives and 3 video capture cards. The thing should be able to capture 12 streams of video simultaneously, or 6 at full 30FPS. But getting Linux variants to properly recognize the serveraid card is a challenge.
The Mandrake LiveCD install works great on IDE systems, no problem at all. But it doesn’t see the serveraid, so that one was out. Gentoo saw the serveraid card, and since video capture and real time analysis is one of those things that would be good to do fast, the gentoo optimization scheme seemed promising, but it wasn’t. Just a miserable series of failed compiles and fixes that went on endlessly.
So from there to Debian, which is very nice and since it is the parent of Ubuntu and there’s an Ubuntu package and Carolyn loves Ubuntu, that seemed worth a shot. It does see the Serveraid, but there seems to be a bug in the IPS.o driver which reared it’s irritating head during package installs causing hangs, even after I updated the firmware to 7.12.12.
So that was out. On to a distro officially supported by IBM: Suse. That installed great, easy no problem, detected all the ADCs on the capture cards and everything. Very easy to install, but there are some weird bugs with ffmpeg that hung the compile of Zoneminder. It descended into another endless series of patch and edit and retry effort to get through the compile….
Then I saw that Fedora 7 has an RPM in the main distro for ZoneMinder. It is officially supported by IBM and seems rock solid. So far the network install has gone well – the install CD is only 7.71 MB (!) and it seems tentatively promising… it’s on the “Starting install process” screen, which is supposed to take several minutes. As it may need a few GB of data, I’ll give it some time. Unfortunately Fedora doesn’t support CD installs and the 342 has a laptop style CD-ROM drive, so doing a DVD install is out of the question. Network installs are efficient if you only have to do them once, but the retry is all penalty download.
big fire plume from the air
someone else got a nice picture on the same day of probably the same plume here.
Racking fun
fans
The rack system we use to house our servers….
The house is not air conditioned and the rack is effectively in the garage, so it needs both dust filtering and self-adjusting cooling to compensate for summer daytimes without being insanely noisy all the time. The fans have taken a little trial and error to get configured right. They are connected to this industrial controller that turns on fans sequentially as the temperature rises.
I just got the door fans repaired after a minor accident that sent one blade flying, and came to two observations:
- The fans are loud.
- I’m not optimally supporting the designed cooling system for the servers.
I visited a massive colo facility a while back and they went on about using CFD to calculate the flow rates through their cages to keep 20kw racks from melting down (about 15 space heaters inside a box) and one thing they mentioned was sealing all the gaps between the front and back of the rack. Clearly I have not done this. The bit I didn’t really think of is that the rack isn’t so much a chimney filled with rising hot air as a jet with the intake at the front and the exhaust at the back. The fan system needs to enhance that jet flow, not some chimney effect with hot air exiting out the top.
That said, normally racks are put in environments where dust isn’t a problem. So I need positive pressure fans to pressurize the front of the rack through filters and compensate for the pressure drop through the media. That should provide plenty of clean, ambient temp air for the server fans to blow through the rack (and provide enough air that the server fans don’t create negative pressure in the front and draw dirty air in though other openings in the front half of the rack).
If that positive pressure turns out to be inadequate, then the temperature controller will turn on negative pressure fans at the back of the rack to exhaust the heated air, which will necessarily increase the flow through the servers and presumably drop the pressure in the front of the rack below ambient and thus, worst case, draw in a mix of dirty and clean air. The compromise is that a bit of dust is better than overheating on hot days.
The temp controller is currently set to turn on supplemental cooling at 85F (inside the rack temp). Since ambient hits 85 on the worst days, that seems like the lowest reasonable temperature to set the controller to.
In the end, if that’s not enough, then a ton of chilled water should do the trick, but I’m hoping not to have to go there…
Black Bumble Bee
Last year I saw one, but it ran away. This is the first all-black bumble bee I saw this year. It’s completely black and very cool looking. I tried to get some better pictures of it, but it wasn’t super keen on posing.
Thermal control
The wiring behind my rack’s new thermal control system’s four stage fan concept. Why? Because of cheap advanced industrial controls on ebay.
