Except that they failed to mention this when we informed them about the move from hyper-connected downtown to the suburb we now live in…

After well over a year of poor broadband speeds I got them (the ISP in question is Glocalnet, subsidiary of Telenor, btw) to acknowledge the problem, and even give us a refund for the months we’ve been paying for a 24 Mbit service, even though actual speed never gets above 5 Mbit.

Fast forwarding a couple of years, we’ve been paying less per month than before, but the quality of the ADSL connection is still poor, with the connection yoyo-ing several times per day. A couple of weeks back I finally had it and told them to fix the problem or stop charging us for a service they can’t deliver. A few days later an SMS arrived stating “your technical problem has been resolved” .

So, to the point of this blog post. How can I monitor they have actually fixed the problem and now provide a stable broadband service to us?

I ended up using a two-tiered approach:

1. External monitoring service
Using a free, third party server monitoring service to ensure there is connectivity from Internet to my home network. As the broadband outages we had experienced were typically quite short (on the order of a few minutes each), I needed a service that would ping a suitable computer in my home network at frequent intervals. Turns out there are many good free monitoring services (moni.tor.us etc), but they all (?) offer 20 or 30 minutes as shortest ping interval.

I finally found Pingdom, which offer you a free account from which you can monitor ONE server, with a shortest ping interval of 1 minute. Perfect. Their web site is slick and no-nonsense, they even have a very efficient and easy-to-use iPhone app. Great.

Only caveat is that you need an always-on computer at home, in order for Pingdom to have something to check connectivity to. Assuming that’s in place, you get stats like the following:

2. Ping from internal network to Internet
In order to minimize the number of false positives I decided to also check connectivity from the home network to a suitable site on the Internet. Once again, this assumes there is an always-turned-on computer in your home network. I use a Linux virtual machine that is always running anyway, looking after various other stuff.

A small script pings www.google.com once every minute and outputs the result into a text file. If Pingdom indicate a broadband connectivity outage, I can then go into the text file to verify that this was really the case (ruling out problems with Pingdom’s servers/service). The script looks like the following, paths might need some editing in other environments.

echo —————————– >> /home/goran/pinglog_google.txt
date >> /home/goran/pinglog_google.txt
ping -D -c 2 www.google.com >> /home/goran/pinglog_google.txt

Add to this a crontab (run crontab -e) entry for running the above once every minute:

# ping Google once every minute to make sure broadband connection is up
*/1 * * * * /home/goran/ping_google.sh

…and that’s about it. Keeping fingers crossed I won’t have to use this data against the ISP – nonetheless good to have it, just in case.

As tmux doesn’t seems to be in the bubba2 or etch repositories, the next option is to build it from source. Below follow some ideas for doing this.

Note: you may need to install/upgrade gcc and other tools to complete the steps below, if you have a standard, out-of-the-box bubba2 system.

1. Switch to su and create a directory for source & resulting binaries
   su
   mkdir ~/project
   cd ~/project
2. Compile proper libevent version
   tmux needs a more recent version of libevent than installed as part of bubba2 standard setup. First remove current libevent, then compile the new one:
   apt-get remove libevent1
   mkdir ~/project/libevent
   cd ~/project/libevent
   wget http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent-1.4.14b-stable.tar.gz
   gunzip libevent-1.4.14b-stable.tar.gz
   tar xvf libevent-1.4.14b-stable.tar
   cd libevent-1.4.14b-stable
   ./configure
   make
   make install
3. Register the new libevent
   Edit /etc/ld.so.conf.d/powerpc-linux-gnu.conf, e.g. by “vim /etc/ld.so.conf.d/powerpc-linux-gnu.conf”, add the line “/usr/local/lib/” (no quotes) at the end.
4. Reload the new libevent
   Simply run “ldconfig”.
5. Compile and install tmux
   mkdir ~/project/tmux
   cd ~/project/tmux
   wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/tmux/tmux/tmux-1.5/tmux-1.5.tar.gz
   gunzip http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/tmux/tmux/tmux-1.5/tmux-1.5.tar.gz
   tar xvf http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/tmux/tmux/tmux-1.5/tmux-1.5.tar
   cd tmux-1.5
   ./configure
   make
   make install
6. Configure tmux and start using it
   First, exit from superuser mode by typing “exit”. Then, you probably want to customize tmux, try googling “tmux config file” or similar for samples. I currently use the following:# Make it use C-a, similar to screen..
   unbind C-b
   unbind l
   set -g prefix C-a
   bind-key C-a last-window
   # key bindings for splitting
   unbind %
   bind | split-window -h
   bind h split-window -h
   unbind ‘”‘
   bind – split-window -v
   bind v split-window -v# Reload key
   bind r source-file ~/.tmux.conf#set -g default-terminal “screen-256color”
   set -g default-terminal “xterm”
   set -g history-limit 4096
   # Terminal emulator window title
   set -g set-titles on
   set -g set-titles-string ‘#S:#I.#P #W’# THEME
   set -g status-bg black
   set -g status-fg white
   set -g status-interval 60
   set -g status-left-length 30
   set -g status-left ‘#[fg=green](#S) #(whoami)@#H#[default]‘
   # set -g status-right ‘#[fg=yellow]#(cut -d ” ” -f 1-3 /proc/loadavg)#[default] #[fg=blue]%H:%M#[default]‘
   set -g status-right-length 75
   set -g status-right ‘#[fg=red]Up #(uptime | cut -f 4-5 -d ” ” | cut -f 1 -d “,”) #[fg=black]#[fg=yellow]#(cut -d ” ” -f 1-4 /proc/loadavg) #[fg=cyan,bold]%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%
   S#[default]‘
7. Start using tmux
   “tmux” starts tmux. Now you can create new windows/panes, and kill the sessions whenever you want. When you reconnect to the bubba2 over ssh, just type tmux attach and you can continue where you left off.

Boot Camp assistant worked great, it created a new Boot Camp partition on the hard drive just as planned with a 32 GB partition. Popping in a Dell WinXP SP2 CD (from a now long gone computer) as instructed, but when prompted to select where to install XP the Boot Camp partition was gone. In fact, so was the OSX partition…
The weird thing was that the XP installer suggested I should install it to a 131 GByte partition on the disk – where did it get that from?

Luckily I have a nightly Carbon Copy Cloner job scheduled for the iMac, so restoring the OSX disk was pretty straightforward (even though it took some 5-6 hours to restore 500 GB of data).

Tried the same procedure twice more. Once with the same result, and once I the OSX partition was actually intact. But XP still suggested I’d install it to the non-existing 131 GB partition.

Fourth time I tried another XP disc, and this time also slipstreamed it with SP3 using nLite (awesome product!). And now it worked flawlessly.

After doing some research it seems that some people are having trouble using Dell XP CDs with Boot Camp. Not sure why, but using that other, generic XP CD made the problem disappear. Or if it was the SP3 slipstreaming – either way it now works. I guess you could argue that the Dell CD was intended to be used with Dell machines only, and in this case that  turns out to be true.. Anyway, with the problems sorted out, dual booting works great!

They indeed repaired the laptop – at least in part. The graphics now works as it should, but the computer is still unstable and hangs way too often to be useful, even with fresh installations of Vista. Loosing work because the computer hangs at random times (several times per hour) just isn’t an option… No idea what’s causing it – feels like it may be poor thermal design/overheating. But that’s just a guess.

Nice of Dell to repair the broken GPU, but too bad they didn’t make the laptop usable again.

Now that’s good support! Let’s just hope that is the end of the story.

Called Dell support who said “sorry – you had a one-year warranty – it expired in December 2008″. Frustrated with a month of crashing Vista I upgraded to a MacBook Pro (great machine btw).  The Dell laptop found a resting place in a drawer.

I’ve kept the laptop in good order, not banged it around too much, always upgraded with latest BIOS and Vista updates etc.

You would think that’s the end of the story… Not so.

A few days ago I stumbled upon a forum post where people were upset about Dell’s poor attitude towards users having problems with their GPUs in certain Dell laptop models. Turns out their problems were the same as I experienced on my M1330 (which has a 128 MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS). Also seems Dell has been aware of the problems for quite some time, but not issued a recall or even a warning to customers who had bought the affected models.

A quick google search reveals the problem seems to be quite well known, there are also videos online showing what the problem looks like.

Btw, a way of testing whether it’s the GPU or display that’s causing the problem is to hold down the “D” key while pressing the power button. The display should now cycle between various solid colors (red, green, blue etc) before continuing to boot in graphical mode (which will fail if the GPU is broken). But if you see the solid colors ok, your display is fine.

So is this an isolated problem for Dell only? Of course not:

Dell has acknowledged there are issues with the Nvidia GPU and offer a 12 month extended warranty to cover for those affected.

HP is also affected, a very long thread in their forum shows HP users are also upset. It seems they have informed their customers though, at least according to CNet and Engadget.

Same thing for Sony, their take is to offer a good and relevant extended warranty: “Sony is offering to repair yours for free within four years of the purchase date, irrespective of warranty status. ”

Apple finally is not immune either, but they also offer a good extended warranty: “If the NVIDIA graphics processor in your MacBook Pro has failed, or fails within three years of the original date of purchase, a repair will be done free of charge, even if your MacBook Pro is out of warranty.”

Here is where I am starting to get really upset.

I was told by Dell support in October that the laptop was out of warranty and they wouldn’t repair it. They told me nothing of extended warranty to cover for defective GPUs.

Six months later (=now) I find out that I was in fact eligible for the extended warranty back in Octobert, but now Dell tells me it’s too late – “You are two months past the warranty period”.

The first version of the 1-wire network will look something like this, possibly with some of the sensors furthest away from the server installed at a later time. Some of these sensors are after all pretty expensive (just the humidity sensor, HIH-4000-001, got it from Digikey, that is attached to the DS2438 AD converter cost around €20). Getting the all the cables in place have also turned out to be a bit tricky, the tubing in the walls back in –65 just weren’t made with cat-6 networks, phone lines and 1-wire networks in mind…

The Linux server will run either temploggerd and owfs (if I can get it to work on the small Bubba Linux server that I am using, so far it compiles ok but doesn’t seem to respond properly to the sensors), or thermd.

I verified thermd runs (it does work as expected but it takes 15-20 seconds or so to update the graphs) on the Bubba server as long as you install the perl runtimes and quite a few Perl packages, but as owfs offers a better client-server approach it would be the preferred solution.

First task: to find a good source for the needed 1-wire sensors and other electronics and hardware.
Some digging around, comparing a lot of prices resulted in the matrix below.
I then ended up buying my 1-wire products and components from Homechip and Hobby-boards, with some additional components from Electrokit.

Please note that prices and other aspects of the stores are expected to change, the data below represent a snapshot as of August 2009. They should in any case provide some starting points for your own 1-wire online shopping adventures.

After recently actually looking into this topic I found the new Mozilla Weave Firefox extension. It is in beta and have some bugs, but is very promising even in its current state. However, it doesn’t sync sessions.

I recently also started using the nice Dropbox service for file syncing. Dropbox has both Windows and Mac clients and works fully transparently: any file you put in the dedicated Dropbox folder on your local computer is automatically synced to the Dropbox service and from there propagated out to your other computers where you have Dropbox installed and running. As you get 2 GB of free storage that is more than plenty for storing session information.

Only thing missing now is to find where Firefox’ sessions files are stored. As I am using the excellent Session Manager Firefox extension, a quick look in the Advanced tab of its options dialog revealed that you can indeed specify where Session Manager’s session files should be stored. Change this to your local Dropbox folder and you are set! As soon as you save a session in Session Manager it will be almost instantly available on your other computers. To use them on these other computers you use the “Load session…” command in Session Manager’s menu, which in turn is found in Firefox’ Tools menu.

Have been using this setup for some weeks now, works flawlessly.

- How much money is spent on heating?

- We have a 45-year old, huge waterboiler in the basement, how much does it cost to keep it running? Would we save money by replacing it with a modern one?

- It is said that return-on-investment on air-air heatpumps is quite short, around 18 months is often mentioned. But before installing such a pump to reduce the need for electrical heating it would be great to have a system in place measuring how much electricity is used for electrical heating before and after the pump is installed, and how much energy the pump itself uses.

- How do you measure the above, collect the data and present it in a good way?

- After installing radio controlled switches across the house, how do you control them in a good way? The included remote works ok, but a computer interface is really what is needed to create more advanced lightning setups.

In the coming posts I’ll sum up the experiences made in planning, building, configuring and running the above services. Having searched the net for information and experiences from others I have found some, but not a whole lot. Hopefully my findings will help others with similar plans and ideas.