Chad’s Blog

CM11A & Temp. Sensors

Finally won an ebay auction on a CM11A, for a 2-way X10 device to hook up to HAL.. Now to wait for it to arrive, and hope its in working condition.

Also ordered me a pack of DS18S20 digital temperature sensors, so I can play with hooking them up to a serial port. Hoping to monitor at least 4 zones with these bad boys, assuming I can remember enough or refresh my memory on basic electronics. Plan to monitor outside, basement, attic and main floor with these. Would like to do more zones than that, but I’ll have to learn how to do more than the 4 shown in an article.

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Gentoo - HP ML370 - Fan control!

I finally got hpasm tools installed on my gentoo box, and the fan has reduced speed considerably.. not to mention the noise level! I had to browse around a lot, and today was the first day I actually found a site that had some instructions that worked! Check it out http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/HOWTO_Use_Hpasm

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Insurance.. sucks and doesn’t..

I  have to post this somewhere.. the insurance process and such that we have here SUCKS! It’s great in some aspects, but my goodness.. the process for all this stuff stinks and reaks of bullcrap! It’s no wonder why it costs so much with all the bullcrap one has to go through. Not to mention the 20 million different (ok slight aggeration on my part, only slight..) bills I got for the whole process for my broken leg was a confusing pile of crap.. I think I ended up with 7 to 10 different places that I had to pay, even after my insurance kicked in (which took a boat load of time..).. and I still have one or two bills left to pay. I thought I was done when I paid the last dollar on a multi thousand dollar bill, only to find out I still had to major ones left.. one never went to my insurance, because the company for that bill doesn’t bill out of state insurances.. so I had to send in the claims forms.. and then another which I had mistakenly thought was an incorrect bill that was taken care of once my insurance started pay, was a valid bill, still owe on that one.. and wouldn’t be surprised if I messed up and that one goes to collection.. I mean come on, how are companies allowed to use the same name as the hospital (which was a great hospital by the way, and no it wasn’t at the one I work at, since I was out of state), with a slight twist of the last word.. With all the different bills that I had coming in and stuff, it was difficult to keep track of who was what etc.. I’d get one bill, then get another that didn’t have all the same stuff on it. It would be great if hospitals and companies associated with them would explain, even in a general sense, of what I would be expect bill wise. It would also be a plus if the goofy insurance companies would explain their process, so that I could at least follow it in some sense of normallacy.. wow. I really need to do this with a spell checker, I know I’ve mashed a good number of words there, but meh.. I dont deal with proper grammer and spelling every day, I have to much code and idea’s floating around in my head to worry about that..

If the health care system would get itself organized properly, I’d imagine there’d be a heck of a cost savings for them let alone for us as consumers!

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First Home, broken leg, past 6~ months of my life..

I’d been ignoring my own blog for quite some time, and I’m sorry blog, but I’m back on it again, hopefully for good at least.. Last summer I finally bought my first house, woot! And I must say it is awsome, to have a place where I can make pretty much any change I want to my place and yard, with-in reason to the law and code and in good faith with my mortgage (to not devalue this house/property I guess). But yeah, I can use the rooms to whatever ends I want, completely have whatever style I want in the house etc.. I had/have so many idea’s for this place, its almost hard to decide what direction to go in.. Well things had been put on hold last fall when I broke my leg while attending a Major function.. Let me just say, that sucked, first time I’d broken anything (other than maybe some toes which I never did anything for..).. I was off my left leg and pretty much bed ridden (doctors orders) for 6 weeks, and off work. I had hoped to be able to at least work from home, but since I was on medical leave it wouldn’t have been proper to do so, so I didn’t… I would love to say I had fun doing all the things I wanted while not working, but I couldn’t do anything! I couldn’t work on my house (which I had planned to do the week after the major during a vacation I had scheduled..). I had great help from my family for getting things around, and doing my errands like getting groceries etc. One of the things I had them help me with was to get my main computer and laptop plus a gaming system setup near the bed I was using so that I could at least stay on the net..

Don’t ask me why I didn’t blog during that time.. maybe I just wasn’t quite with it.. It didn’t help that I had a hard time sleeping during that first few weeks after the surgery (I got a rod and 4 screws.. yippy!) or that my days were pretty much unstructured. They had sent me home with pain meds, but of course, I hate taking anything, so I think I only ended up taking 2 possibly 3, just to help throb the pain to at least try and get some sleep during that first week home. I have to say, its hard to sleep not only with the pain, but I’ve done that before so it wasn’t just that, but the fact that I was so restless after laying in bed pretty much 24/7 (only up to use the rest room and get food pretty much, and feed the kitten).. I think I pretty much wasted a good chunk of that 6 weeks (and some time after!) playing an additive web game called … heh, I cant remember now, some role playing type game where you “build” a castle and.. oh yeah, Evony or something like that.. I will confess, I also spent money buying virtual currency for that too.. wow that was somewhat lame at first, but cool, because it let me catch up to those that have been playing longer than I.. I cannot remember how much I spent in terms of my time and Money in that game, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was over 200 bucks easy.. way more than I’ve ever spent money wise in terms of game cost and subscription fees for most games except maybe WoW..

I had tried to get back into some games that I’ve played a lot, WoW being one of them.. I just couldn’t get back into that at the time, as most of my friends that had been playing it had either stopped, or taken a break, or split up into other servers. It also didn’t help that it felt weird trying to play any first person or third person game from bed..

After about 6 weeks being on my back and off work I was able to finally resume work, in a limited capacity.. I couldn’t really lift anything heavy. I had to wear a “boot” for that leg for a while (I think I stopped in either november or December.. can’t recall when for sure), which was annoying as heck, as my leg would swell up at certain points with the boot on, and get quiet uncomfortable.. at one point my doctor wanted me to start walking with my boot and crutches, which at first was great, seemed mostly ok. Then after a week or two of that (at least I think thats about the right time frame, kinda blurry now..) I wasn’t to need the boot and shouldnt need any other support. Well that went ok for a day or so, and then it started hurting again. so I went back into the boot and one crutch for probably a few more weeks. I want to say that it was probably around December when I was able to finally walk without either boot or crutch, with just a slight limp (my ankle was still having limited range at that time)..

I did not do therapy for this at all by the way.. as my doctor said as long as I didn’t think I needed to, I wouldn’t have to. They gave me some great exercises, some of them was a bit difficult to do.. as I wanted to do them but I wasn’t suppose to cause any pain and they would, so I didn’t do them all. I think it was sometime after the new year when I could finally walk with barely a limp, and sometime during the early part of the year I got rid of that pretty much all together.. there are still some times when my leg will do something funny, like part of it feels like its colapsing or something.. and not to mention, it felt really weird knelling on my knee while working on the living room that I was painting and doing some work on..

Anyways.. enough rambling on this for now..

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X10 - what in the world?

Wow, I have to say, the x10 universe is a confusing pile of wowness.. I have been playing around with X10 with one of my old XP boxes I got from work, a Dell Optiplex GX260 (had to get memory, a hard drive, and a cmos battery for it) and X10 Commander (which I also have the X10 Commander iPhone app). I also played with some other programs, but I don’t remember what ones they are, sorry, I dont have that computer in use at the moment, and they were rather… lacking in polish. But the X10 Commander did work for the most part, most of the time. The main problem I had was that generally the app on my phone would load to fast before it could talk to my XP box running the X10 Commander program.. so 9 times out of 10 I would have to go out of the app, and back in just to get it to talk.. But it was still cool to open my garage door, control 8 or so other lights from my iPhone.. Soon I want to be able to run my own app, or web page from any device, and have some parts of that automated, (lights on in the house after dusk at various randomized times for instance) without having to have an extra windows box running just for that. I had moved the X10 Commander over to another GX270 that I had been using for my Amazon Video On Demand, but it only had one comm port, and during the summer I didnt want to leave that box on all the time, as I don’t have Central Air to combad all these pc’s I’d be running. I had found an open source(at least I think it was open source.. or was going to another form of open source) program called Heyu, that seemed pretty straight forward.. Only thing is, it would only work with certain modules, one of them being my RF device, a CM17A. It wouldn’t talk to my serial to power adapters, a IBM Director CM11A or a SmartHome PowerLine 1132B. Now supposedly it should have talked to the CM11A, but I couldn’t get it to work, but it did work for the most part. I really didn’t know if I wanted to use the CM17A or not, I mean it worked great for the most part, at times though I had a hard time getting my remote controller that I used for my car to talk to the house to tell it to open the garage door wouldn’t pick up well, so I had tried to use two RF receivers, and that seemed to help. One day one of my devices stopped picking up the signal to turn on/off.. and I think it has to do with the fact that I ran some more CAT 5 cables for my video cameras that watch the front and back yards, were somehow interfering.. even though those signals went across the regular power lines, I couldn’t understand any other way why and x10 module on that particular circuit wouldn’t work.. I’m still learning about all this cool X10 stuff, but if I cant get it consistent, I may look into doing another style of control, maybe a direct wire hookup, since I have to replace all the 2 wire in my home to the 2 wire with ground anyways..

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HAL on a ML370

I’ll have to apologize for my “running” of this post, as it happend over a period of about a week durning the evenings when I was at home and not off at a business meeting or seminiar or Men’s leadership.. so if I jump from point to point, its how it came out from my recollection of the events that I went through to get the server to this point.. Also side point, I dont claim to be perfect when it comes to “writing” articles in any language, so for those that love to bash my poor English grammer and spelling mistakes, bite me, I write in computer languages, not books for students to learn properness.. maybe more on that later…

Today I’m going to continue my quest in turning in an old ML370 that I got from work, into a Home Automation L(something,, maybe layer? Laughs..). I call it HAL for now, mostly because eventually I’ll be talking to it.. HAL, open the gargage door.. HAL… muhaha

I have to say, trying to get that box to work was a pain in the rear, the way Compaq/HP do there servers is extremely confusing to one not used to their methods.. This box has various SCSI cards (one is a AHA-2944UW) and such in it. The main one is a huge Smart Array card 221, which is connected to the backplane for the hard drive carriage, that holds 6 drives. I have 3 18.xGB and 3 72.x GB HDD’s in it, old beasts, but so far they work.. I had intended to run Gentoo on one drive, have two of the 18’s in a stripe array and the 3 72’s in a RAID 5 config.. but things didnt quite work out due to my lack of knowledge on how the smart array worked..

Before I continue on with the controller, let me tell you about the fun I had with getting that far.. I would get these lovely messages after booting the server (by the way, it takes 30~ seconds before the system even POSTs after a power on, I’m guessing some kind of self checks and such..), about no scsi devices found, so boot devices found.. It wouldn’t boot from the CD’s I had for the Compaq stuff, I was getting fustrated.. not even a bios screen to be had! Turns out that you have to use compaq’s system utilities to do anything with the machine. Normally there is a system partition installed, but since we’ve been using this box for other things and I’ve moved the hard drives around (we used some of the other larger ones in another HP box I built at work), the array was confused and there was no system partition to be found. I finally had the genuis idea to put the Compaq system cd in one of my other computers, and was presented with a program to make various floppy diskettes for booting and utilities etc.. One of the first ones I used was the System Eraser, so I could take it back to a blank slate and start over. That took me a few tries, because I would get it somewhere, would get to finally boot from a cd and tried to use the Auto setup, which was no help because it never installed the Compaq System to a partition (didn’t help that I had no Logical Volumes setup for it to do that to..) So after probably 2 nights monkeying with that, I finally got the right set of floppies and got it erased, and use the program to setup the Smart Array logical volumes with a RAID 0 on drive 1 and 2 (they start at 0) known as /dev/ida/c0d0, for fast video capture (I plan to have my camera’s around my house talking to this box) and a RAID 5 (on drives 3,4,5 known as /dev/ida/c0d1) for various longer term storage, and one non RAID drive (disk 0) for the OS and boot partitions. Well I messed up with Drive 0, because I didnt define a non RAID Array entry for it, so it wasn’t even availiable for an option with gentoo, I can later add it, but I’m not sure how I can rearrange it so that its the first item, and not the last (/dev/ida/c0d2)

It turns out that you have to define Array Groups, which I understood with all the array’s I’ve had to build with DAS’s and SAN’s at work, but I didnt realize I had to define an array just for the one single drive, so I only ended up with the striped array and the raid 5 array, and ended up installing Gentoo on the Striped array (yeah I know.. yuck!). I will hopefully eventually move the OS partition (/boot and /) back to the single one, if I can figure out how to change the “letters” of the array..

I used GRUB and gen-kernel for the gentoo setup, the rest was pretty much the defaults.. I ended up compiling the gen-kernel with the menu option, as I needed to select the Compaq Smart Array Controller into the kernel (wasn’t even a module the first few times I tried to install gento.. ug.. 8~ hours spent learning that one..). So then I was able to get to GRUB booted, and then it couldn’t find a valid root partition.. geesh.

The problem that lead to this was a new one for me. It turns out that when, at least with this Smart Array Controllers drivers that I was using, that devices (HDD’s) are named /dev/ida/c#d#p#, not the usuall that I was fimiliar with, /dev/hd(LETTER)# or /dev/sd(LETTER)# or even the other raid styles.. so for instance, I have one controller, /dev/ida/c0, with one dynamic volumn /dev/ida/c0d0 and 4 partitions. /boot was installed to /dev/ida/c0d0p1, swap was installed on /dev/ida/c0d0p2, Compaq System Utilities (this was another strange thing to learn..) was on /dev/ida/c0d0p3, and finally root was installed to /dev/ida/c0d0p4..

So part of my grub configuration had root pointing to the /dev/ida/c0d0p4.. right? Well not quite.. apparently the driver that I was using on the LIVECD for gentoo, and once I’m booted into gentoo from the hdd, report it as /dev/ida/c0d0p4, right? Yeah.. but GRUB on the other hand, or maybe the kernel during boot(not sure which is confused..) refer to at least the root partition as /dev/ida!c0d0p4… Confused yet? I have to say, that took some magic to figure out, I found a few posts referring to  /dev/cciss!c0d0p3, but mine didnt work with any variation of that, so finally I figured out to use the shell of grub (I couldn’t really find much help with the time I spent looking on that) to use ls /dev.. and wahoo! I found a /dev/ida!c0d0 device.. so I exited the shell, put in /dev/ida!/c0d0p4.. didnt work, then realized I put in the slash still, and did /dev/ida!c0d0p4 and boom! I had a booting system. I had to update the /boot/grub/grub.conf root entries, and fixed another typo and I was thus able to boot without having to touch the console.

Wow.. that took me longer than I thought to get that out, maybe that’s why its been a year and a half since I’ve posted anything on my blog..

Anyways, I hope to continue posting my journeys (as a coworker would say) on my blog here, so that maybe at least one person would learn something from how to install stuff on to an HP 370. Next up, hopefully my control system, and wrestling to get hpasm installed so that I can get the LOUD fan under control.

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Home Automation

Well this past week I’ve resumed my quest to create a home automation system using linux and other opensource/free software.. I have hopes to use what I have, which is a hodge podge of equipment that I either got for free or found cheap online.

One of the programs I’m messing with is Heyu, which seems pretty straight forward so far.. I’ve messed with a crontab job to turn on one of my lights at a specified time. Later I hope to write me a perl script so that I can somewhat randomize when lights come on, but we’ll see.. So far I can control some of my lights remotely, which is mostly cool.

I’m hoping to add voice control at some point, but the “new” box I’m building with gentoo on it, an HP ML370 (I think its a first gen) doesn’t have a sound card if I recall.. so I’m not sure yet how that’s going to work..

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Friday night - Team/MonaVie Leadership Convention

Wow! I must say, I’m always blown away by something at each Major Convention I attend.. and this time is no different. As one of our business investments into the Team System, the Web site subscription for our business center and tools etc. we will now be getting monthly subscriptions to the recently revamped Success magazine. I’m kind of a bit tired but man, I can’t wait to get a hold of that. I’ll likely try and see if I can find some of the back issues (5 so far I believe, of the redesigned ones). Another feature is that it sounds like we got to customize the future one’s as well.. Not 100% sure on all the details but it sounds like its the newsstand copies that will have 8 pages of Team (MonaVie? <- not sure yet on this) related materials! That’s never happend before in any magazine of this calibur. More later, I’ll also try to get some pictures if the area tomorrow and likely get those posted on Monday, or maybe tomorrow morning if I get a bit of time before I go in for the all day event.

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Team - MonaVie Fall Leadership Convention

Well I’ve arrived at my hotel here in Louisville, KY. I’m now just waiting for the doors to open so I can head over (its across the street from here at the Expo Center)..

There’s quiet a line-up of speakers planned for this weekend it sounds like, and I cannot wait to hear what they have to teach..

More soon!

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CrewQ.com back!

I’ve finally regained control of my first web domain! Some Squatter over in China nabbed it while it expired during my first move, and I was without internet for approx 2~ months I think then.. Also didn’t help that the email notices went to my hotmail account that I RARELY check…

Soon I hope to restore some of the functionality that I had on it.. Not sure if I’ll resurrect the LICQ skin hosting or not.. Not even sure they still skin that program, or if its even being updated these days…

Anyways, stay tuned for more news on that!

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