Burning the Midnight Comes to an End

Burning the Midnight Comes to an end. finding blogger a bit limited to expand on.
I have launched a new site at http://cyber-punk.info

This site is about technology with a Cyberpunk focus and and view to the cyberpunk counter culture. Also interweaving with cybergoth, biopunk, Postcyberpunk and trans-humanism sub cultures. Posting blogs, movie reviews, counter culture news and information on Cyberpunk.  

Also, worth checking a few other of our new sites.

BenAly 55 - Fashion supply and retail. Based in the Philippines and Australia.
www.benaly55.com

BenAly Fashion and Event Rentals - Gown and dress rental for events/social/pageants/weddings.
www.benaly-rentals.com 

Solar Grid Inverter Monitoring System - Part 2

The second part of this project requires the RS232 to be signalling at a longer distance than the usual fifteen metre limitations.

To overcome this distance limitation and maintain reliability of the serial network, we use of a special telecommunication device called a RS232 extender. 


The RS232 Extender

The Gefen RS232 extenders will be used to extend the RS232 connection from the Fronius IG grid inverters to the remote location, with over one hundred feet of Cat5e cable.

The Gefen RS232 extenders will perfectly reproduce all 9 pins from one end to the other and have the ability to provide power over Ethernet to the second extender, saving on extra cables and power supplies.

The extender units act as a sender and receiver pair on the RS232 network. Allowing the grid inverter's data logger to send Windows computer information to the Fronius access software.

The RS232 extender sender unit connects to Fronius IG grid inverter at one end and the RS232 extender receiver at the computer terminal at the other end.

Then the Cat5e cable connects the send and receive extender units, over 300 metres away. The sender unit is powered by a 5 volt power supply, which will also power the receiver via the Cat5e cable.


The Fronius IG Access Software

The free Fronius Solar access software is available for download from their corporate website at http://www.fronius.com. The software provides advanced onsite data analysis and archiving options for the PC. As an administrative tool, it offers full setup options for all system components in Solar Net.

The software is easy to install on the Windows system, with a helpful installer wizard.

Once installed, the software is located in the programs section of the windows start menu.

The Fronius access software splash screen displays the general energy output information for the photovoltaic solar power system.

Under the administration menu, the new PV system can be added and configured for the RS232 connection back to the grid inverter's data logger.

In the next part of this series, I will be looking at connecting the monitoring software and data logger to collect information from the school's solar power system, and explaining the features and advantages that computerised power monitoring can have for an organisation.


Other PV Solar Powered Systems and Concepts

A PV solar power system has many other applications apart from grid power installations. One example is NASA's Helios aircraft, remotely piloted to fly at high altitudes.

The electrically powered Helios is constructed mostly of composite materials such as carbon fibre, graphite epoxy, Kevlar, styrofoam, and a thin, transparent plastic skin.

The main tubular wing spar is made of carbon fibre. The spar, which is thicker on the top and bottom to absorb the constant bending motions that occur during flight, is also wrapped with Nomex and Kevlar for additional strength.

The wing ribs are made of epoxy and carbon fibre. Shaped styrofoam is used for the wing's leading edge and a durable clear plastic film covers the entire wing.

The Helios collects a variety of information in the atmosphere, and runs mainly on solar power.

On August 14, 2001, the Helios Prototype, piloted remotely by Greg Kendall, reached an altitude of 96,863 feet, a world record for sustained horizontal flight by a winged aircraft.

The altitude was more than 11,000 feet or more than 2 miles (3.2 km) above the previous record for sustained flight by a winged aircraft. In addition, the aircraft spent more than 40 minutes above 96,000 feet.

Tragically the Helios crashed over the Pacific Ocean on 26 June 2003.

Solar Activity and the Risks to Modern Technology

In the middle of our solar system sits a incredibly large nuclear reaction held together by an enormous gravity pull. Many millions of times the mass of the earth, this star emits solar weather that stretches out past the orbit of Pluto. As with weather on earth, the sun's weather can form destructive storms that stretch out from the sun's surface onto the Earth and further into the solar system.

These solar storms are full of particles (protons, electrons, and plasma), radio waves, x-rays and other forms of energy that come from nuclear reactions.

When these storms reach Earth, they can having varying effects on our planet.


What does this have to do with Technology?

Most technology systems, with the exception of the military and some corporate technology, have no built-in resistance to the effects of extreme solar storms.

This means that most of our electronic devices, electric motors and power systems are very vulnerable to solar activity, which may render the devices partially or totally inoperable.


Why Should we be Worried About the Effect on Everyday Technology?

On September 1–2, 1859, the largest recorded geomagnetic storm occurred. Aurorae were seen around the world, most notably over the Caribbean; also noteworthy were those over the Rocky Mountains that were so bright, the glow awoke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning. Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed.Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire.

Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.

This storm was called the Carrington Event and similar strength storms reach the earth every few hundred years.

A storm like the Carrington Event today would cause most of our modern technology to fail within hours. There would be significant electronic damage, power failures, global financial confusion, and disruption to transport and communications.

Without active help and intervention, areas of the earth could experience famines, civil unrest, and wars.



Recent Solar Storms and Increasing Activity Causing Increased Risk

On the 3-5th of August, we had a geomagnetic storm interact with the Earth, causing a G3 storm event to our magnetosphere.

This storm was impressive, but lucky not a threat to most communication and power systems. However, it posed large issues for satellite operators and space operations.



G3 Solar Storm Effects:

Power systems:  voltage corrections may be required, false alarms triggered on some protection devices. Spacecraft operations: surface charging may occur on satellite components, drag may increase on low-Earth-orbit satellites, and corrections may be needed for orientation problems. Other systems: intermittent satellite navigation and low-frequency radio navigation problems may occur, HF radio may be intermittent, and aurora has been seen as low as Illinois and Oregon.

All the definition for the scales of geomagnetic storms, solar radiation storms, and radio blackouts levels are located at the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) website. http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/NOAAscales/index.html

NOAA also has a website devoted to monitoring solar storm activity and contains other excellent information on solar activity. http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

This current solar cycle is showing signs of the beginning of a very active period for solar storms and risks to the earth.

This cycle will continue to increase in activity for several years before subsiding into a calmer part of the cycle.


What to do About the Risks of a Solar Storm?

The issue needs to be treated like an natural event, similar to earthquake risks. As with earthquakes on Earth, we have built better buildings, invest in detection and prediction, educating people and designing government polices to deal with such a disaster.

Just with earthquake risk management, solar storms need to be addressed to minimise the harm to our way of life.

Possible improvements to solar flare storm risks:

• More EM shielding in electronics devices
• Better designed power systems and grids.
• Better warning and forecast of solar storms
• Understand the sun and it's dynamics better.
• Education of people on the topic in a meaningful way.
• Government polices on the issue, risks and reactions to events.

Through education of the public, better understanding of the sun and laws requiring built-in protection for important devices and systems, the world can become resistant to this type of event.

We may never be able to remove the risk of solar storms, but we can minimise its harm to our technology driven world.

Easy ESXi 4.1 with serial or USB UPS control

In the past, there has always been a problem with setting up USB uninterruptible power supply to VMware ESXi servers.  Here is the method of enabling a VMware ESXi 4.1 bare-metal server to communicate with an inexpensive serial or USB-only UPS system.

Install a Guest Windows System

You will need to install a Windows virtual machine to run the power management software, and connect to the UPS system.


I have used APC Powerchute software on a Windows 2008 server with this installation method, and encountered no problems.

Most Windows OS guests with USB management software should work in the same way.


Enabling the USB Pass-through  

Now that ESXi 4.1 has been released, it is possible to use a USB data cable on any UPS and communicate with Windows control software.  

ESXi 4.1 has the ability to make a USB connection from the server hardware, directly through to a virtual machine hosted on the same server.

This allows UPS monitoring software to run on a windows virtual machine on the server and talk to the UPS on the ESXi server USB hardware.

You will need to make sure the USB adapter is attached to only the power controller guest OS, to minimise other guest OS conflicts. 

The management and attachment of the USB hardware is done in the virtual machine hardware configuration screen.

When adding USB hardware to the hardware of the virtual machine, a new option is now available for direct USB hardware access.


Enabling the SSH Service for Root Access

The next step is to enable the SSH service on the ESXi server, so a root remote console is present via SSH.

You will need physical access to the ESXi server, so you can login to its console as the root user.

Edit the configuration file for SSH with the following command:

nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Find the line that starts with PermitRootLogin and change the "no" to "yes".
 
Restart the sshd service with the command:

service sshd restart

The SSH service will now accept root logins to the console for running scripts. 



Windows Guest Script File  

On the Windows virtual machine running the Powerchute software, a small .bat file needs to be created, pointing to a free SSH client called Putty.

You can download Putty from their website. http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ 

After getting Putty and setting up the .bat script, log into the same directory on the Windows guest. 

You will be able to point your UPS control software directly to the shut-down script on the local host.

Windows .bat file:
-------------------------------------------------

putty "server-address" -l root -pw "password" -m Unix_Commands

-------------------------------------------------


Unix_Commands file:
-------------------------------------------------

poweroff

exit

-------------------------------------------------


Final Notes

This new feature for USB connections in ESXi 4.1 makes it very easy to implement UPS systems into the VMware environment. I have only tried this with Windows 2008, running APC Powerchute software and uninterruptible power supply with USB control. But I believe any configuration of Windows and power control software should work.

New Section in Scribd and the Natural Revolution

A new section in Scribd.com has been added to the Burning the Midnight profile.

Two articles have been uploaded to the Technology and Business collection for the new section.

• Technology, Natural Capital and and the Natural Revolution Slides  
• Innovation of Technology in Business Slides

 
Here is an embedded slide-show on Natural Capitalism and Revolution from the Burning the Midnight Scribd profile.





Watch the profile http://www.scribd.com/burningthemidnight for recent publications from Burning the Midnight, and further insights and information on technology, business, economy, security and environmental topics.

VMware Server 2 - Part 4 - High Availability Services

High availability is a general requirement, rather than a extra feature, in today's server environments. Especially as organisations and people have become more reliant on IT systems for everyday tasks. A simple way to build redundancy into VMware Server 2 software is by using the Linux High Availability software on a Linux CentOS installation.

This example configuration works well for systems that are server-only devices, e.g. web servers, FTP servers or internet mail systems.

Desktop virtual machines are not recommended for this set-up, because information can be lost when the Linux HA starts new instances of all the virtual machines.


Two Things Required

For this project, there are two requirements for constructing a small cluster of VMware Servers.

• Redundant Datastore
• Redundant Server Hardware

In this example, the redundant datastore will be using FreeNAS, with Linux HA offering the redundant VMware Server services.


Linux High Availability

The Linux HA software maintains a set of building blocks for high availability cluster systems, including a cluster messaging layer, a huge number of resource agents for a variety of applications, and a plumbing library and error reporting toolkit.

For this example installation of Linux HA, the heartbeat will be using the IPfail service, which will be the main focus for the VMware Server redundancy.

The Pacemaker functionality will not be used for this example, but can be used in larger server farms for cluster management.


Setting up the Linux HA on CentOS

An IP network, using a crossover Ethernet cable on eth3, has been set up on both the CentOS VM servers, which is used to send heartbeat information to and from the Linux HA services.

It is important that your host file contains the correct host names of the servers, as required by Linux HA.

I.e., for this example Server1 and Server2 need to be in the host file.

more /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1                  localhost

192.168.0.100          Server1.test.com.au server1

Below are the example configuration files for the Linux HA on each of the VM server.

(CentOS Server 1)
/etc/ha.d/ha.conf file
-------------------------------------------------------------------
logfile /var/log/ha-log
watchdog /dev/watchdog
bcast eth3
keepalive 2
warntime   10
deadtime  30
initdead  60
auto_failback on
node Server1
node Server2
udpport  694
respawn root /usr/lib/heartbeat/ipfail
ping 192.168.0.1
--------------------------------------------------------

/etc/ha.d/haresources file
--------------------------------------------------------
Server1 192.168.0.100/24/eth0 vmware::start
--------------------------------------------------------

/etc/ha.d/authkeys file

--------------------------------------------------------
auth 1
1 crc
--------------------------------------------------------

(CentOS Server 2)
/etc/ha.d/ha.conf
--------------------------------------------------------
logfile /var/log/ha-log
watchdog /dev/watchdog
bcast eth3
keepalive 2
warntime   10
deadtime  30
initdead  60
auto_failback on
node Server1
node Server2
udpport  694
respawn root /usr/lib/heartbeat/ipfail
ping 192.168.0.1
--------------------------------------------------------

/etc/ha.d/haresources file
--------------------------------------------------------
Server1 192.168.0.100/24/eth0 vmware::start
--------------------------------------------------------


/etc/ha.d/authkeys file
--------------------------------------------------------
auth 1
1 crc
--------------------------------------------------------



The Network Attached Storage Setup

The network attached storage being used for the VMware is the open source FreeNAS distribution. FreeNAS is a free network-attached storage server, supporting: CIFS (Samba), FTP, NFS, rsync, AFP protocols, iSCSI, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, and software RAID (0,1,5), with a web-based configuration interface.

In this example, the two VMware Servers are connected on a separate IP network on eth1. The gig-E switching network is then connected to the FreeNAS server where the vmdk files and datastores will reside.

CIFS or NFS mounts will have to be setup on the NAS before installing any virtual machines, so that the VMware Servers can mount the FreeNAS server, giving a redundant storage of the VM's vmdk files.

Example of mounting the NAS from CentOS:

mkdir /vmware

mount -t cifs  //FreeNAS_IP_Address/vmware /vmware -o user=admin,pass=abcde

Make sure that the /etc/fstab file is updated with the mounting information, so that the NAS mounts will reconnect in the VM Servers on reboot.

192.168.10.10:/vmware /vmware cifs defaults 0 0


Overall Setup of the System 

The overall setup uses two separate switched networks for reliability to the NAS and Internet - one network for the redundant NAS services to the VM Server for the VM's vmdk files, and the other network for data access to the Internet and other LAN services.

The two VM Servers are connected by a crossover Ethernet cable to run the heartbeat service.

The heartbeat service controls the VM Server redundancy.

This setup (or close variations) allows for a reliable setup for high availability VM Servers, without investing in an expensive SAN and only using the free VMware Server 2 software.


There is more to come in "VMware Server 2 - parts 5 and 6". 

I talk about monitoring the server, and changing system resources, among other things VM technical.

Stay tuned...

Solar Grid Inverter Monitoring System - Part 1

Solar based power has become an important part of modern strategy for some organisations as they move from carbon based fuel dependence to renewable energy. One of my current projects is looking at a solar power applications for a school that is working towards establishing a carbon neutral power system.

The solar panel array that is currently installed on the school's roof has enough panel area to produce up to 5 kilowatts of electrical power on a sunny day.


Fronius Grid Inverters
 

Three Fronius Grid Inverters

Three Fronius IG 30 grid inverters can feed up to 7.5 kilowatts of power back into the grid, or to the school's AC electrical systems. These high power inverters form the centre of the photovoltaic system, as AC power and access back to the power grid is essential at the school.

Grid inverters are essential for a power system to have mains AC power and photovoltaic power, enabling seamless use of both power sources as a single power source.


The goal of this project is to network the Fronius inverters into a PC system running MS Windows, so that information about the power grid and photovoltaic solar array can be collected for educational and organisational use.



Cabling the Grid Inverters for Computer Monitoring

Inverter, fuse box and Cat5 plate

Blue cables are the serial bus

The three Fronius grid inverters have been mounted on the wall in a way that makes it easy to network the units together.

The three inverter units all have special Com cards, so they can be networked together in a bus type network.

At each end of the Cat5 bus network, special terminator plugs are used to close circuit on the network.

Grid Inverter Bus Network and PC Serial Connection

The last unit has a special data logger card that gives the Fronius grid inverters a data IO port for a computer via RS232.

The data logger card has a DB9 connector, which has been then converted to Cat5 for easy of use in the networking cabinet. 

RJ45 connector in the rack to the Data Logger

The cable run from the DB9 connector on the inverter can be up to 20 metres in length. But for longer lengths of cable, RS232 extenders maybe required. For this example, the Cat5 serial cable is terminated into the network rack in another building.

The Windows PC is connected to the terminated rack connection, which connects back to the Fronius grid inverters with which the Windows PC will be communicating.



For part 2 of this project, I install and setup the Fronius IG access software on the Windows PC.

I will also be explaining the features and advantages that computerised power monitoring can have for an organisation.

Stay tuned.