MaisonBisson

It turns out that one of my co-workers is blogging over at Live Journal.

It’s a shame that Dell doesn’t list the thermal loads of their products in the datasheets at the online store. It’s a shame that it took several Google searches to get close to a link with the info, then mine the Google cache of a Dell support forum and find/follow a chain of links before I could get that detail.

As it turns out, there’s some Dell and the Environment page where they list all their products and their environmental properties/certifications/regulatory compliance. When you do find it, you’ll discover that a Dell PowerEdge 2650 is listed with a minimum heat dissipation of 878 BTU/hour, but no maximum. The datasheet for the similar Dell PowerEdge 1850 server claims 854.69 to 1,387.73 BTU/hour.

It would of course, be better if Dell offered a link like how hot does my server get? or something else like that. Let’s hope Google indexes this.

We could see messages about the tape drive in dmesg, but it wasn’t giving the device name. We tried working with /dev/st0, but we kept getting errors. Everything seemed right, but it didn’t work.

It turns out our SCSI card was the problem. It wasn’t being properly recognized. After a tip, we tried the following:

/sbin/modprobe aic7xxx

Where “aic7xxx” is appropriate for our Adaptec card.

We checked lsmod and found the aic7xxx stuff properly initialized there (shortened output):

/sbin/lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by    Not tainted
st                     30612   0 (autoclean)
aic7xxx               127232   0
scsi_mod              126812   4 [st aic7xxx aacraid sd_mod]

Then I went looking for the tape drive here:

cat /proc/scsi/scsi 
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: DELL     Model: PERCRAID RAID5   Rev: V1.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 06 Lun: 00
  Vendor: SEAGATE  Model: DAT    DAT72-000 Rev: A030
  Type:   Sequential-Access                ANSI SCSI revision: 03

Finally, dmesg shows the following:

st: Version 20010812, bufsize 32768, wrt 30720, max init. bufs 4, s/g segs 16
Attached scsi tape st0 at scsi1, channel 0, id 6, lun 0
(scsi1:0:6:0) Synchronous at 40.0 Mbyte/sec, offset 32.
st0: Block limits 1 - 16777215 bytes.

iTunes on the PC on my desk (notice I feel more possessive of the desk than the PC) hasn’t been able to share music to or from iTunes on my PowerBook. Blame the firewall.

A moment of Googline led me to Travis Saling’s guide to enabling iTunes sharing through a firewall. Here’s the ports that need to be open:

Port 3689 TCP

Port 5353 UDP

However, he notes:

Mac OS X users have it slightly simpler. They only need to allow one port through [port 3689 TCP], for reasons that are unclear to me as yet (I’m guessing the Mac firewall is at least partially stateful, which would explain this).

Sun’s T3 documentation is available online:

The Sun StorEdge T3 and T3+ Array Configuration Guide explains physical configuration.

The Sun StorEdge T3 and T3+ Array Administrator’s Guide explains the software side.

The short course:

Creating volume ‘v0’ using half the disks:

vol add v0 data u1d1-4 raid 5 standby u1d9
vol init v0 data
vol mount v0

Creating volume ‘v1’ using the other half of the disks:

vol add v1 data u1d5-8 raid 5 standby u1d9
vol init v1 data
vol mount v1

Listing volumes:

vol list
volume        capacity   raid   data     standby
v0            108.6 GB    5     u1d1-4    u1d9
v1            108.6 GB    5     u1d5-8    u1d9

A friend sent this along yesterday:

I was visited, a couple of weeks ago by an FBI agent investigating whether or not I was involved in terrorist activities. Seems one of my neighbors (I don’t know who) placed an anonymous call saying that “[name deleted], who works for [airline name deleted] and lives [address deleted], resembled a terrorist on a watch list.”

So, the guy had to come over here and make sure I was not evil. After being here about 20 minutes and asking me some basic questions about my background, he left, convinced I was not plotting to blow up the free world. I thought the whole thing was the funniest f’n’ thing I’ve ever experienced.

Give them credit for investigating every little tip they get, I guess.

I ran across Darren Barefoot‘s Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness, where he catalogues “wacky, bizarre, surreal and otherwise strange examples of technical documentation.” Considering the number of poorly done or just weird technical illustrations we’ve all seen, you’d think the gallery would be larger.

When done with that, go to the Snope‘s Urban Legends Reference Pages photo gallery. You’ll laugh at some of the images (and you’ve seen at least a few of them already), but the real entertainment here is in the stories that supposedly explain what’s true and what’s false.

• Swim-up, floating blackjack tables for your pool. Yes, the Hard Rock Las Vegas has similar stuff, but their minimum bet is too high for my game.
• There’s a sock subscription service, and it’s been around for five years.
• A Chinese DVD player manufacturer has developed a unit that excels at playing China’s famous black market DVDs.
• I’m not that excited about case-mods, but this Predicta case-mod gets my nod. If you’re like me, you’ll go looking for more about the Philco Predicta and cruising eBay for them.
• Everybody tells me BitTorrent is cool, but I have yet to check it out.
• LA now has an Erotic Museum.
• Tor is an amazing anonymizing networking protocol
• The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse is a great resource for copyright info and for copyfighters

In commenting on the Space Race story, Zach pointed out that the Moller Skycar is still under development (which is better than going bankrupt or just disappearing — like so many other good ideas have). If you poke around the site you can find video of flight tests and sales info. Yes, they’re taking deposits for deliveries they hope will start in 2006.

Meanwhile, the sky hasn’t fallen on the Trek Aerospace Millennium Jet either. It did a successful un-tethered forward flight test in early 2004 and the site claims more is in store.

For options available today (and for less money than either of these will take you for), you might look into the Rotary Air Force 2000 GTX-SE. For around $30,000 you can have an aircraft that can take off in less than 75 feet, land in less than 10, cruise at 80MPH (100MPH max), and burn only 6GPH.

You’ll need a full private pilot’s license with rotary wing endorsements, but it could be the ultimate commuter vehicle.

Im jealous I didn’t think of these things before Kyouei Ltd. released them as a product. A DVD that fills your TV with solid colors to illuminate the room. A CD with 99 tracks for 99 tones: “When using the ‘random’ function, the CD will automatically select random tones, and make a new melody.” A combination of battery, LED, and balloon that results in a glowing glob of latex.

The only thing cooler than these is a little book titled Count Sheep that was filled with pages of identical sheep arranged in rows and columns, ready for counting.

Alternet is featuring a story about the Bush administration’s attempts to reduce nuclear power plant safety requirements. This news might have slipped by unnoticed, except Mainichi Daily News is reporting on a steam explosion at a Japanese nuclear plant that killed four and injured seven workers today. Bush’s plan, against this background, seems haphazard.

At least this accident didn’t result in a radiation leak, the the 1999 Tokaimura nuclear accident did. One worker was immediately killed and two others seriously injured when a batch of uranium ‘went critical.’ At least one of the injured workers died during recovery, and countless others will be subject to as-yet unknown health effects from the radiation leak.

Most people think of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island in this context, but InfoPlease has a convenient short-list of nuclear disasters, Green Peace has much longer (though more complex) list of nuclear accidents.

It’s been almost 47 years since Sputnik began the space race and 35 years since a few men hobbled about on the moon, but I don’t yet have a flying car and I can’t take an orbiting vacation. Folks, the space race wasn’t won, it was abandoned. And that’s why we have the Ansari X Prize.

Burt Rutan’s team seemed to be in the lead earlier this year with the successful launch of SpaceShipOne, the competition has been in the news lately. The da Vinci Project is hoping to launch on October 2 (exactly 47 years after the launch of Sputnik). The da Vinci team, which recently got a cash injection from an online casino, is using a helium balloon to get to 25km (80,000 feet), then launching their rocket for the last 75km from there.

Others haven’t been so lucky. Space Transport Corp lost their prototype in an explosion; Armadillo Aerospace lost theirs to throttle problems during a recent test; and after some early successes, development of Rotary Rocket’s Roton seems to be dead.

Public Radio’s Savvy Traveller has some travel perspective on all of this.

Thanks to Ars for some links and a heads-up.