Oh no! I had a fit-PC die!
John Canfield
They sent it to me in the mail and I tried to boot it up this morning
and it's pretty obvious from watching the HDD light that it isn't
going through the boot process. I tried to reboot it from the front
push button and it isn't working either. My guess is the drive
crashed, but that's just a wild guess so I'm going to replace the fit.
Anyway, I'm looking around for suitable replacement options. Last
time I looked, I couldn't find any fit-PC Slims unfortunately and the
follow-on products are considerably more expensive.
Any ideas out there?
Thanks - John
John Canfield
a 8Gb SSD which I like - it makes the fit more heat tolerant.
Greg Kondrasuk
http://www.jr.com/pogoplug/pe/PGG_POGOB01/
Shipping is actually free if you join their "Friends with Benefits"
program, which is also free.
You can install Debian on it via a USB thumb drive:
http://jeff.doozan.com/debian/
John Canfield
I have a Sheeva plug hanging around somewhere that I was thinking
about using, but after many flash memory failures (we used to run
hacked NSLU2s) in the past, I'm sticking with either a traditional
hard drive or SSD. Reliability is a *major* factor in the decision
(plus, it's not my money ;-) )
John
Thomas Keffer
Hi, John
Check out this site for some ideas.
These mini-ITX systems are pretty impressive.
-tk
________________
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harry felder
SSD. I got a 30GB one for $55, which is orders of magnitude overkill
for weewx. The SSD fits inside the case and there is no fan. The plug2
is based on a low power Marvel System-on-a-Chip, much like the
Sheevaplug is. You could use any 2.5 SATA disk instead of the SSD.
I have to warn you that I cannot yet confirm that the stock
tonidoplug2 kernel (Linux 2.6.31.8) works with the VantagePro2 w/out
problems. Right now I'm getting some problems in weewx during the
configuration phase, and haven't had time to learn the python debugger
to see what is happening. Could be a bad VantagePro2 too.
Hope this helps,
hf
vds
> time I looked, I couldn't find any fit-PC Slims unfortunately and the
> follow-on products are considerably more expensive.
>
Really depends on your size+power+environmental needs.
I use a Seagate Dockstar with a matching disk docked to it.
It's been up since early Nov-2010 with zero outages.
Model is Seagate STDSA10G-RK FreeAgent DockStar
which I found online for $20 (really). I found a $2 laptop
drive enclosure that works in it online. All that's needed
after that is any laptop drive.
Benefit of the Dockstar is that it's essentially a Sheeva plug
internally, but it looks way better especially if you put the
matching Seagate disk in it. Having a laptop drive on it
makes support easier, as you can simply 'dd' an image to it
once your get the Dockstar bootloader set up.
The model I have isn't made any more and it's hard to find,
so I bought a second one just in case the first one ever failed.
If you go with the Dockstar, be sure to get the right model number
so you get the 'real computer inside' version mentioned above,
and not the dumb-usb-dock variant. I 'think' the newer variants
are equally hackable but since I have a backup disk and system
stored just-in-case, I haven't been keeping up with it.
vds
go for more expensive hardware. These days if I was going to throw
$200 at it, one of those new nettop mini PCs would be worth looking
at. Something like a Asus EB1012PB0320 ($200 on Amazon) or the like.
Benefits include the fact that they're pretty darn small and tend to
be fanless, yet they have reasonable size HDD in them, many even have
wireless networking, and all have video+keyboard+USB so setup is a
snap. I could see you buying several and doing a minimal Linux on
them pretty easily. Other benefit is that if 'that' vendor stops
making that gear, dropping in a similar box from another vendor would
be pretty easy too.
I've learned a lot doing my own mini-ITX from scratch, hacking the
NSLU2, and for the last year+ doing the Dockstar but after a while
using commodity hardware and throwing another $100 at the problem
sometimes starts to look good. Really comes down to your footprint
+environmental constraints and figuring out what your time is worth to
you.
Just a thought....
stumpey
(USD40) off ebay its has an 8GB CF card and has been running a year
with various stuff and now dedicated to weewx.
OS is Ubuntu server with Apache dishing out the webpages from home,
the average load is 0.19% when just running my weather site so no
complaints.
John Canfield
is very attractive but as small as it is, it is too large. The park
office is used to the tiny volume of the fit-PC slim so I better stick
with something similar. I also like the ebox (a lot!) but it uses a
CF for storage. I found an eBox on eBay that would auto power-on but
it was 95 pounds (http://bit.ly/tUuBzO). The tonidoplug2 looks great,
but will it auto power on? I'll dig into the tonidoplug2 more - it
looks like the most viable alternative aside from the fit-PC2.
John
stumpey
more power but you don't have to use the CF card.
Thomas Keffer
In checking out the ebox I ran across this nice summary of hardware options: http://wiki.meteohub.de/Hardware_Overview
Of course, this is in the context of a competitor of weewx. ;-)
-tk
________________
Blame my Android for any typos.
John Canfield
I've looked in on him off and on for years, but I'll always be a weewx
fan-boy ;-)
I just got the okay to order a replacement and I bought the fit-PC2
with 8 GB of SSD (rev 1.4 for auto power on.) There is a high comfort
factor for me with the fit-PC, so it was an easy purchase. The fit-
PC2 runs Linux Mint which I think I read is based on Debian (like
almost every distro.) I'll have the fit in my hands Wednesday, so it
will be fun to bring up another new box.
If I can find a 2.5" IDE case around the junk box, I'll try to recover
any data on the HDD.
John
On Dec 11, 3:53 pm, Thomas Keffer <tkef...@gmail.com> wrote:
> In checking out the ebox I ran across this nice summary of hardware
> options:http://wiki.meteohub.de/Hardware_Overview
>
> Of course, this is in the context of a competitor of weewx. ;-)
>
> -tk
> ________________
> Blame my Android for any typos.
stumpey
head round a server version with no desktop then you can gain a lot
more space on the storage and have a quicker system.Ubuntu server just
takes 1GB where Mint can take up to 5GB. If you want to use a server
version but are not comfortable with just command line then a good
half way house is to use Webmin this is a nice easy GUI that most
people will be comfortable with without having a full blown desktop. I
use Webmin and Byobu for easy server maintenance purely because I am
lazy and my days of having the 500 page DOS book next to me so I can
look up the commands and switches are long gone :). I have lost a few
brain cells (due to having fun) over the last 50 odd years and it gets
harder to remember stuff :):)
I am not trying to tell you how to suck eggs :) you may be a whizz on
the command line so apologies and ignore above if you are. :)
John Canfield
Mint is the officially supported Linux distro for the fit-PC2 and I
have no issue with command line, so that's a good tip to install a
server version. I've been messing around with Linux since the early
90s when getting X to work was usually a journey into frustration. I
also use Webmin sometimes on my weather box.
I'll need to read the fit-PC2 forums to see if there are any kernel
issues with Ubuntu and the fit-PC2. Since I'm bringing up a new box,
I can play around.
Thanks again,
John
stumpey
remember the frustration things are a lot better now, even though my
job is to administer our Microsoft network at work I would never have
ms products at home and all pc's lappys and servers are all Linux or
mac.
Try byobu as well this allows you to have multiple command windows
open at the same time which stay open when you close them, so you can
leave stuff running and come back later to check very useful when you
are debugging or just want to backup etc.
John Canfield
I would love to use Linux 100% of the time but I use Adobe CS4 for web
authoring, etc. and there isn't an open source equivalent so my
primary desktop dual-boots. I had my wife on Ubuntu for a year or two
and that worked out fairly well, but the hardware croaked so I
replaced it with an older desktop running XP. I had a 12" Powerbook
G4 and that thing was great when it worked, but the WiFi was
intermittent. Apple initially said no trouble found, but finally they
replaced the mobo and I received it back dead - wouldn't even boot.
Back to Apple. Then the HDD died, replaced same. It's now happily
gathering dust. Apple stuff is gorgeous but way too expensive.
Funny you mention admin duties - before I retired about 10% of my job
was administering our group's NT 3.51 server and some desktop
support. I always had a surplus PC running on our LAN as my personal
Linux sandbox.
I've never heard of Byobu - I'll check it out.
John
stumpey
Let us know how the new project goes
Steve
John Canfield
I've been investigating the mechanics of installing Linux on the fit-
PC2 and it appears I'm going to need to install a server version (I'm
going with 10.04) from a USB CDROM drive and not from a flash drive
unfortunately (it seems to be a long and ugly story) so I just ordered
an external drive from Amazon. Earlier versions of the fit- PC2 had
some issues with a 10.04 server install, but I think it will work well
for me since we are V1.4 Compulab has binaries and source for up to
and including 10.04 (addition to the /etc/apt/sources.list) and then
they must have dropped Ubuntu for Mint.
I'm a little surprised they are only officially supporting a desktop
version (Mint) since many users are running the box headless. Oh
well.
Since I started looking at versions, I checked my fit-PC Slim and I'm
on 9.04 and upgrading it to 9.10 as I type this. Then I'll try to
take it to 10.04.
John
vds
equivalent, I thought I'd post the link to the forums over there where
folks keep up with what's available where.
http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,3202,6360,page=3#msg-6360 has all
kinds of good pointers, including the Canadian variant of the Dockstar
for $25, so they're still out there if you look a little.
Jeff's site is very good for learning how to get Debian onto Dockstar/
Sheeva-like gear.
stumpey
version they are more stable and on a server you do not need to be
cutting edge with the latest version as the priority is stability and
reliability.
Steve
John Canfield
When I did a do-release-upgrade -d from 9.10 to 10.04 it eventually bombs out due to the i586 instruction set of the GEODE cpu - 10.04 is looking for an i686 instruction set (they want the "cmov extension.") Guess 9.10 will be my LTS on the fit-PC slim ;-)
John
stumpey
work that has not been rebooted in three years looks like it will just
die in harness :) We are waiting to see who goes first the server or
me :)
Steve
Thomas Keffer
+1
My Fit is running 8.04 and has been up for well over a year now.
-tk
________________
Blame my Android for any typos.
John Canfield
the power supply to test the one the state park sent me (they didn't
include the PS.)
FedEx brought the new fit-PC2 first thing this morning but I'm still
waiting on the CDROM drive - it should be here in a bit.
John
vds
page.
Has anybody looked at the Trim-Slice line ?
http://trimslice.com/web/models
The Trim-Slice Pro looks a bit interesting for $325.....
John Canfield
Update - Ubuntu 10.04 server and weewx installed on the new fit-PC2. The OS took less than a Gb (850 and change) so we have a good 5 Gb+ for other stuff after installing Webmin and weewx. It's cocktail hour at the ranch, so more work is deferred until tomorrow.
John
Thomas Keffer
I like the power consumption --- 3 watts. Wow! If you believe it, that's half what the Fit uses.
-tk
________________
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John Canfield
The station's website is weather.graysonfirends.org
Thanks everybody for all of the help through this process!
John
John Canfield
Thomas Keffer
-tk
Oops - typo in the link - the correct URL is weather.graysonfriends.org
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Thomas Keffer
Email: kef...@threefools.org
Skype: tkeffer
+1 541-386-8891 (h)
+1 541-490-9507 (c)
John Canfield
#errorCatcher Echo
## $Revision: 401 $
## $Author: tkeffer $
## $Date: 2011-03-30 14:58:33 -0700 (Wed, 30 Mar 2011) $
John
stumpey
#errorCatcher Echo
## $Revision: 407 $
## $Author: tkeffer $
## $Date: 2011-04-02 10:31:34 -0700 (Sat, 02 Apr 2011) $
I only started weewx just over a month ago so guess I have the latest
version.
Steve
Thomas Keffer
The check looks something like:
#if $day.extraTemp1.has_data
...
#end if
Check and see if it is still there.
-tk
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John Canfield
check in mine. There's no way I can remotely access the server so it
is what it is for now. My buddy has a summer home near the park so
when he gets up there, I'll have him log in and look for the check.
Thanks Tom.
John
stumpey
me would be port 22 so I could ssh into the server, is this not
possible?
Steve
John Canfield
could do that, there are humongous security issues since the LAN is
controlled/owned by the state of Virginia - I'll bet they would scream
bloody murder if they knew there was an open port to the Internet.
Before I got a static IP at the house (we travel a lot in the summer),
I set up a reverse ssh tunnel from my fit-PC Slim to a remote host
which was nothing but trouble, big trouble to a) make it work and b)
keep it working. I would get it working then something would happen
on the host end and I would spend days troubleshooting and going back
and forth between the host tech support and looking on my end. What a
nightmare that was.
Troubleshooting involves the park staff looking at the lights and
pushing the button to reboot. If that doesn't work, they send it to
me. Not the most efficient way, but it does work out in the end.
stumpey
a work and at home I forget the problems when you are playing with the
big boys :). Does not make life easy but must be a pain in the
backside when something is wrong and you have to send the hardware
back and forth to get it fixed. A five min job could take days!
Steve
vds
I've seen this on my station where I had old historical (bogus)
data in the database. The python code sees if there's anything
in the database...not if there 'should' be anything there.
I commented out the extra sensor stuff in my templates to be sure.
(and later cleaned up the database cruft).
John Canfield
That's an interesting thought, but I don't want to do any hardware
mods. I was thinking about setting up a cron job though and having it
reboot once a week (or whatever.) I might ask my buddy to set that up
when they return to their nearby Virginia summer home next year. I
installed Webmin on it so I could easily talk him through a cron job.
I set it up so that security packages would be automatically
downloaded and installed, but an update might need a reboot to finish
installation.
John
wb5tht
> 11KViewDownload
Joseph Miller
I have since moved on to a mini-itx system and have wired the relay from the home security system in parallel with the reset button of the mini-itx. This has proven to be quite reliable. If it goes down, the next step will be a cheap ac alarm clock that I cut the minute and second hand off of, and a roller microswitch that will get closed once every twelve hours.
The plan is to migrate from wview to weewx Jan 1. Of course, after that, nothing will ever go wonka-wonka again!
Happy Holidays to all
Joe KI7WV
________________________________
John Canfield
gateway and I had no access to it at night or weekends, so I used a
simple AC timer that turned the PC off for one minute every midnight.
Not very elegant or even desirable, but it worked out okay and it kept
going.
At the house here, I have an Internet enabled power controller set up
that lets me remotely power-cycle the fit should it go stupid. This
has worked out extremely well - last summer I had to log into the
controller and power-cycle the fit since it went dumb. Not sure what
happened to it but I couldn't ssh to it and it stopped uploading. I
can also power-cycle the house switch and house AP. I have the
primary router running Tomato and it reboots itself every night. All
of my Ubiquiti Bullets are optioned to ping its upstream brother and
reboot if no response. I have a really robust network going and it
has been extremely reliable, at least so far.
There are commercial products available like what you hacked together,
but good for ya'.
You will like weewx a lot - it is extremely stable, easy to install
and configure! I ran wview for a couple of years and it was always
'interesting' to install and keep running. So welcome aboard to the
weewx family!
I also ran a slug (three of them in total) and they were not reliable
at all - I had several flash drives go bad. A major step up in
reliability was moving to the fit-PCs.
John
> 15KViewDownload
Thomas Keffer
I can't speak for the hardware or Linux in general, but a key design goal of weewx is stability. If it crashes I want to know about it so I can do whatever forensics are necessary so the failure mode can be designed out of it.
-tk
________________
Blame my Android for any typos.
vds
> I have since moved on to a mini-itx system and have wired the relay from the home security system in parallel with the reset button of the mini-itx. This has proven to be quite reliable. If it goes down, the next step will be a cheap ac alarm clock that I cut the minute and second hand off of, and a roller microswitch that will get closed once every twelve hours.
>
> The plan is to migrate from wview to weewx Jan 1. Of course, after that, nothing will ever go wonka-wonka again!
>
wview (which 'I' switched from 'last' Jan 1st after running it for
many years on a variety of hardware). I've had zero weewx outages or
reboots at all other than ones I caused fiddling around with my custom
templates and the like. Zero.
One thing I would suggest is not using a usb key or SD or CF card as
your disk. Laptop drives seem to work much better. Remember a VP2
datalogger holds a week's worth of data, so there is really no reason
to reboot every 12 hours. weewx automagically catches up when it
comes up. Pretty cool.
My Seagate Dockstar has been up over 100 days at this point, with the
last reboots being me fiddling around over the Labor Day holiday
weekend duplicating my disk drive and Dockstar images onto a second
copy of the hardware, just in case a hardware issue pops up. You
can't get the Dockstar any more.
The only maintenance I do is to grab a snapshot of the data manually
once per week or two and upload it to Dropbox, mainly because the
Dockstar variant of Debian doesn't have a Dropbox version. When I
used to run on the mini-ITX hardware, I had a cron job copying dumps
of my databases daily to the Dropbox folder so it was all hands-off.
John Canfield
finally made time to mess with it yesterday and it would do a POST and
partially boot, so that was very encouraging. I had no interest in
trying to fix whatever the problem was so I was going to try a fresh
install of Ubuntu. I tried 9.10 and then 9.04 and discovered the
repositories aren't active (duh), so I thought just for grins I would
try to install 10.04 LTS and see what happens.
My fit-PC Slim would NOT upgrade from 9.10 to 10.xx balking about the
CPU instruction set, so I had no hopes it would install/run on the
broken fit. Much to my delight, it did successfully install from a
USB cdrom drive. All of the packages are up to date on the old server
and it's just humming along.
I'm going to install weewx on it and get it configured as a spare for
the park.
Merry Christmas to everybody!
John
Thomas Keffer
So, I know it can work correctly!!
-tk
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Tom Keffer
I'm going to take the opportunity to upgrade to 10.04 LTS.
-tk
John Canfield
generator installed.
John
Joe Percival
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