Using ZoneMinder with a cheap CCTV camera

Posted on 24th April 2012 by flup

One of the server rooms I look after has an old CCTV camera in the ceiling, and I decided to press it into service to enhance security for that room. I now get alerts from Nagios when motion is detected, so that I can go and see who’s been poking around. Here’s how I got there.
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Restoring datastore performance graphs after upgrading to vCenter 5.0U1

Posted on 23rd April 2012 by flup

Datastore performance data graphs just say 'No data available'


My recent upgrade from ESXi and vCenter 4.1U3 to 5.0U1 went so smoothly, I should have known that not everything was as it should have been. My battle scars from decades of fighting buggy software (in other words, software) were tingling, and it wasn’t too long before I found the problem. All my datastores’ non-realtime performance data graphs—which I rely on for troubleshooting slow VMs—were blank. ‘No data available‘ was all I got. A call to the refreshingly excellent VMware support folk resulted in a pointer to this KB article. It’s a bit involved, especially if you don’t already have PowerCLI installed, so here’s a quick walk-through.
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Getting ESXi 5.0 to use a remote syslog server

Posted on 4th April 2012 by flup

I just had a quick call with a very helpful VMware support guy about this. I’ve just upgraded my ESXi boxes from 4.1 to 5.0, but I wasn’t getting any messages at my remote syslog server any more. Here’s a quick guide to making it work.
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Dying of AIDS? Cheer up: you’d have died eventually anyway!

Posted on 3rd April 2012 by flup

As I slowly go through all my old radio memorabilia, I’m rediscovering all sorts of interesting things that I haven’t seen for decades. They range from the mundane to the historically fascinating, but this particular example is perhaps the most unpleasant item I’ve found so far.
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Posted in rants, religion | Leave a comment

Metered estate lock-in: an update

Posted on 2nd April 2012 by flup

My previous post about supplier lock-in and metered estates generated a modicum of interest, both in the comments and in messages I’ve received directly. It seems that there is a small but significant number of medium-to-large metered estates where the consensus necessary for switching suppliers is rendered impossible by the inevitable turnover in fixed-term contracts. The Competition Commission’s order requires that all residents on a metered estate must be free of fixed-term contractual obligations before a switch can be made.

Rather than updating the original post again and again, I’ll summarise what I’ve found out so far.
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Moving from Debian ‘stable’ WordPress to the latest version

Posted on 28th March 2012 by flup

I’ve been running WordPress 3.0.5 for a while now, as it’s the version in the current Debian ‘stable’ repository. For a while now I’ve been meaning to move to the latest and greatest (which, as I write, is 3.3.1), but didn’t want to mess about with pinning in apt to run a ‘mixed system‘. WordPress has had its own automatic upgrade system since 2.7, and with a history of nasty vulnerabilities, I want to be able to apply upgrades as soon as they are released by the WordPress team.
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Digitising my radio memorabilia

Posted on 27th March 2012 by flup

Radio Sofia logo

A few weeks ago I dug out two bulging ring-binders full of brochures, letters, leaflets and books that I received in the late 80s and early 90s from radio stations all over the world. I scanned a fascinatingly po-faced bit of propaganda from communist Albania, before (possibly foolishly) deciding to scan the lot and make it all available. I figured that some of this stuff must be pretty rare, and possibly of interest to someone or other. Then again, maybe not :-)

It’s a huge task: I’m no archivist, and I don’t have a big fancy scanner like they do at work, so it’ll be a while before it’s all available.

Have a look at what I’ve done so far (at the time of writing I’m only half-way through ‘C’!).

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Leafing through the Marxist-Leninist press

Posted on 1st March 2012 by flup

If you’ve arrived here expecting a cache of Marxist-Leninist newspapers, I may have misled you. I am neither a Marxist nor a Leninist (although I do have a soft spot for Imagine), and if I’m completely honest I don’t really know the difference. The title of this post is actually taken from a c1990 programme schedule for Radio Tirana, the English-speaking Albanian equivalent of the BBC World Service. As someone who heard that programme first hand, I can tell you that it was exactly as interesting as it sounds. We’ll get back to Albania shortly, but first a little context.
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Upgrading Solaris 10 to Solaris 11: things you should know

Posted on 16th January 2012 by flup

I used to have a soft spot for Sun. I cut my teeth on a Sun 3/50 running SunOS 4.1.1, marvelled at the crystal-clear screen of the SPARCstation SLC, struggled with the half-baked Solaris 2.1 x86, schlepped countless Ultra 10s around a big EDA shop, and ran lots of mid-range Sun hardware. However, since Oracle took over, in my view there has been a loss of interest in small- to medium-sized systems, and a significant regression in the quality of support. For me, it’s no longer a value proposition.

However, I have quite a few (what I now regard as) legacy systems running Solaris, so I have to keep my hand in. At the beginning of the year I decided that I should start playing with Solaris 11 with a view to upgrading my existing systems. Solaris has always been a bit quirky, but it had a few surprises in store for me. Hopefully this post will mitigate the shock of those planning a move to 11.
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No gas exchange allowed: Calor cynically locks in an entire village

Posted on 13th January 2012 by flup

For the majority of the UK population, it would be unthinkable to live somewhere untouched by the mains gas network. Most of the country benefits from a pool of aggressively competitive energy companies offering dual-fuel discounts, assorted tariffs, smart meters and other nice things. A plethora of price comparison websites plead for your business as the different companies jostle for position in this crowded market.

Surprisingly, one doesn’t need to venture too far from large towns to leave the mains gas grid behind. Take a drive into the country and you’ll see plenty of houses with their own bulk fuel tank, whether LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) or heating oil. There’s competition here, too; not as much as for the mains, but there are still quite a few companies offering tank rental and filling services. It works pretty well: they just turn up every so often and top up the tank.

There is a third category: so-called metered estates. These are typically new housing estates, built outwith the reach of mains gas, where the developer has arranged for a bulk LPG supplier to install large tanks that will feed the whole estate. Generally (although not always), the householders will have individual contracts with the supplier. Clearly this is an uncompetitive environment, as householders can’t switch suppliers, no matter what happens to their bills.
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Posted in politics, rants | 5 Comments