From rnovak at indyramp.com Mon Jun 11 23:20:59 2012 From: rnovak at indyramp.com (Robert Novak) Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2012 23:20:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Baylisa] New mailing list server, openings for Short But Cool next week Message-ID: Hi folks, Welcome to the new and long-deferred BayLISA web and mail server. We've retired the old dual-processor Ultra 2 and migrated to a Postfix+Mailman mail environment. There's still a bit of tweaking to be done, but we think things are mostly working now. baylisa-jobs and the members mailing list will be coming in the next day or two, and we will be putting the list archives up for members to browse if they so desire. Next BayLISA Meeting - Short but Cool, June 21, 7:30pm. RSVP/Updates at http://www.meetup.com/BayLISA/events/42778262/ We do still have openings for short-but-cool talks for the June 21st meeting. The slots are 10-15 minutes, with preference to live demos or practical experience reports. Powerpoint recitations on their own merits aren't so great, unless you are REALLY creative. Get in touch with me directly, or directors at baylisa.org, if you'd like to sign up for a slot. Send a 5-25 word bio and 5-25 word talk synopsis, and a link if you like, and we'll add you to the list. As always, any suggestions, comments, questions, or ideas for future events are welcome. Drop me a note or contact directors at . Thanks, Robert Novak BayLISA President From rick at linuxmafia.com Tue Jun 12 01:26:17 2012 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2012 01:26:17 -0700 Subject: [Baylisa] New mailing list server, openings for Short But Cool next week In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20120612082616.GB5191@linuxmafia.com> Quoting Robert Novak (rnovak at indyramp.com): > Hi folks, > > Welcome to the new and long-deferred BayLISA web and mail server. > We've retired the old dual-processor Ultra 2 and migrated to a > Postfix+Mailman mail environment. > > There's still a bit of tweaking to be done, but we think things are > mostly working now. baylisa-jobs and the members mailing list will > be coming in the next day or two, and we will be putting the list > archives up for members to browse if they so desire. Robert's being modest, but he's the guy who completed the migration after a number of starts over the last couple of years. Salut! -- Cheers, Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio Rick Moen Is like being nowhere at all. rick at linuxmafia.com All through the day as the hours rush by youtube.com/watch?v=86FRyKBVTsw You sit in the park and you watch the grass die. From rnovak at indyramp.com Mon Jun 18 16:42:32 2012 From: rnovak at indyramp.com (Robert Novak) Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2012 16:42:32 -0700 Subject: [Baylisa] Reminder - BayLISA Short But Cool this Thursday Message-ID: Hi folks, tl;dr: http://www.meetup.com/BayLISA/events/42778262/ BayLISA's Short But Cool summer meeting is this Thursday, July 21, at 7:30pm. We're at the 2025 Stierlin Ct (Mountain View) building, in the 2nd floor "Unite" meeting room, this month. We should be back to Culture Club again next month, and in the City of San Francisco the month after. More news on both of those soon. Current confirmed talks are: * Jesse Monroy on Regular Expressions and Named Pipes * Bruce Markey on The Virtual Systems Administrator * Joseph Atkinson of FreeBSD/iXsystems on FreeNAS plugin architecture * Robert Harker of Yahoo Sports on Developing at Speed with Jenkins We're also happy to thank iXsystems for bringing pizza and drinks for our meeting. Be sure to RSVP so we know how much to have them bring. We do have room for a couple more, so if you have something you'd like to give a 10 minute demo/talk about something interesting in your system administration world, get in touch with me directly (with a fairly brief synopsis and bio so we can list it on the sites) and we'll get you on the schedule. Thanks, Robert Novak BayLISA President From david at catwhisker.org Wed Jun 27 10:27:18 2012 From: david at catwhisker.org (David Wolfskill) Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2012 10:27:18 -0700 Subject: [Baylisa] UPS battery modes of failure Message-ID: <20120627172718.GG1832@albert.catwhisker.org> About a dozen years ago, I had an opportunity to obtain a UPS that had a number of attributes that I found rather attractive at the time; among them: * It was rated for well above the maximum load I would put on it. * It didn't need a special power circuit pulled -- it uses a regular NEMA 5-15P <=> IEC 60320-1 C13 power cord. (Under my load, it draws < 3A @120VAC.) * It is of the "online" (or "double conversion") type. (See .) * It can accept an arbitrary number of daisy-chained external battery cabinets, each of which can hold up to 2 sets of batteries. Each set is quantity 5 12V 5Ah Sealed Lead-Acid storage batteries. The UPS cabinet itself holds (up to) one such set, as well as the UPS "guts." I originally got the UPS; a few months later, I found one of the external battery cabinets at Halted. Within a year or so, it became evident from physical inspection that I needed to replace the 15 batteries -- many were showing signs of stress (bulges where the plastic case should be flat; some cracks in the cases), so I did. A few years later, someone on craiglist was offering a couple more of the external cabinets for $80 (IIRC), so I picked those up. Naturally, the batteries in them were beyond hope, and by that time, I figured I should replace the 15 that I had before, so that was another 140 lbs. of batteries (quantity 35 at 4 lbs. each). About a year or so ago, the UPS started -- occasionally -- whining; in particular, whining about the batteries. A visual inspection showed nothing unusual; we hadn't had any outages of significant length. And the battery voltages each registered >12VDC when I had disconnected one lead. And since these are "sealed" batteries, using a hydrometer to test the specific gravity of the electrolyte isn't feasible. (Had a battery registered ~10VDC, that would indicate a possibility of one cell being shorted or otherwise damaged -- a 12V lead-acid battery has 6 cells, each of which has a potential of around 2.1V. A mode of failure that can produce this is the formation of "dendites" in the battery.) Through a bit of hacking (trial-and-error), I found that hitting the "silence" button alone only stopped the whining briefly (perhaps as long as a couple of minutes), but hitting it, then unplugging the UPS, then plugging it back in seemed to stop the whining for some time (usually, several days). While this behavior was obnoxious, it was evident that the UPS was actually working (as the load remained powered when I unplugged the UPS) -- though I wasn't especially keen to determine the length of time that condition would prevail empirically. Now, the UPS alone should keep my load up & running for a bit over 30 minutes (with new batteries). Each full (2 sets) external cabinet (again, with new batteries) should add a little over 80 minutes of runtime. I was thus rather dismayed to find that when we had a service change (replacing the main breaker panel for the house) that the load was maintained for less than 15 minutes: this was not the desired behavior. Weekend before last, I finally set aside some time to investigate. I figured I'd first unplug the UPS, then plug in a power strip where the UPS had been and plug the UPS into the power strip -- load should stay up for the few minutes (at most) that would take... yeah. Well, it didn't work out that way: less than 15 seconds after I unplugged the UPS, it flatlined (and I was annoyed). So I brought everything back up with no power protection (scary!) and started poking around in the UPS -- vacuuming out the dust, checking connections, connectors, and voltages.... and found that it wouldn't even keep itself up & running (no external load) more than about 20 seconds with the external cabinets attached, and less than 5 seconds without them. I had already contacted the manufacturer some years ago; they weren't especially interested in further support, as the model had been obsolete for a few years by then -- and it's been my experience that the reversibility of this phenomenon is sufficiently rare as to not be worth pursuing. On a whim, I tried swapping batteries between the UPS cabinet an one of the external cabinets. After that, the UPS was able to keep itself up & running for over 2 minutes -- not a long time, but demonstrably longer than 5 seconds! This led me to suspect that: * The (basic) cause of the failure I was seeing was likely an issue with the batteries, rather than the UPS itself. * The UPS was quite correct to whine about the batteries (though it might have been nice to have more of a clue -- e.g., which battery (or batteries), and what the nature of the issue is/was. After some further research I suspect that -- since each of the batteries still shows >12VDC -- the likely issue is something called "sulfation". It seems that -- especially in the absence of discharge cycles -- lead-acid batteries develop coatings of lead sulfate (which is an electrical insulator) on the plates; as this happens, the battery effectively loses capacity (as that is directly proportional to the amount of exposed surface area in each cell). Around 2000, a fellow named Alastair Couper published an article () that describes the construction and use of a circuit to "desulfate" the plates of lead-acid batteries. (Note: there is an erratum for that orignal article, reading: "In my battery desulfator article on page 84 of HP77, the value for C2 should have been 0.0022 ?F, not 0.022 ?F. My mistake.") Unfortunately, it appears that Sealed Lead-Acid batteries are reported () to be poor candidates for this "pulse conditioning." I'm thinking of buying a commercial device that purports to use this technology to see if I can reverse the "sulfation" somewhat. Unfortunately, just as the layer built up over time, removing it also takes time (as overheating one of these batteries tends to make caustic messes). And I have a lot of batteries to treat. (Further, there can apparently be some "interesting" effects with respect to distortion of the pulse if one isn't fairly careful about the connections, and I suspect that trying to "gang-condition" 5 or 10 batteries arranged in parallel might be prone to failure, and may well take just as long as doing them each, one at a time.) But it seems to me that *if* this works, it would make sense to incorporate the approach in the UPS charging circuit in the first place. Given the time I bought the UPS, it's certain that it was designed well before Mr Couper published his article. Though I don't recall seeing anything in recent UPS specifications or features that appears to indicate that the approach is actually being used. And I need to figure ouot some sort of evasive action I can take to try to prevent a recurrence of the problem -- perhaps keep a battery cabinet out of service most of the time, letting it self-discharge, and rotating which cabinet is out of service...? (In my case, the external battery cabinets are hot-pluggable.) Peace, david -- David H. Wolfskill david at catwhisker.org Depriving a girl or boy of an opportunity for education is evil. See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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