Wx.Ca News

Wx.Ca News

Randy Peters  //  Wx.Ca

Jan 13 / 6:06pm

Wx.Ca Was Missing Due to IP Address Change

Many people noticed that Wx.Ca was unavailable for a couple of days. The problem was that the IP address assigned by Shaw changed. A quick update to EasyDNS and everything is OK again.

Shaw has only changed our IP address twice before in the last 12 years, so I have never bothered to install one of the clients that will notice when the assigned IP address changes and send the update to EasyDNS. Now that it's the Airport Extreme that gets the address assigned to it, I'm not sure it's even possible.

Comments (1)

Oct 17 / 8:49am

Wx.Ca readings are missing because the TStik loses its brains.

Wx.Ca is missing readings for the past 12 hours. The culprit has been located:

The little TStik board from Systronix that samples all the sensors every 3 seconds lost its programming. A simple reload of the Java byte code that it runs and all is well again.

Comments (0)

Oct 11 / 9:40pm

Served by Snow Leopard

The other two Macs at Wx.Ca have been running Snow Leopard for about 6 weeks now. No big issues, so today I upgraded the server as well.
I did hit one minor snag. It may be related to the OS upgrade also upgrading Java 5 to Java 6.

The server listens for a multicast packet from the Tini board sensor monitor. Previously, this was done just by joining a MulticastSocket to the correct IP address and listening. However, under Snow Leopard and Java 6, the socket only appeared to be listening on the loopback interface, lo0 as reported by netstat -g. The cure was to call socket.setLoopbackMode(true) which disables listening on the loopback interface and then listens on the ethernet interface.

Comments (0)

Sep 19 / 8:32am

Uh-Oh

Last weekend, I dropped my iPhone once too often.

I'd dropped it quite a few times before, mostly because the Vaja Case I use does not grip it very well and it pops out sometimes. This time, it looks like it took a direct hit along the edge onto a cement block.

We were in Vancouver at the time. It still worked, so I used Google Maps to find we were only 5 blocks from the Apple store. We walked in and discovered that Apple stores are always too busy to do the pop in and expect to get technical assistance.

We flew home that evening and I made an appointment at the Calgary Apple store for the next day.

Yes, they could replace the screen on site, but for $250.00!!! Well, that made it pretty easy to decide to upgrade to an iPhone 3G S instead.

Faster UI. Better camera with video. And the oh so important compass.

Comments (1)

Aug 30 / 8:55am

Back To My Mac Fixed By Changing DNS Server

Wx.Ca has 3 Macs—2 Mac Minis and a MacBook Pro. To try and keep their email accounts and bookmarks and several other things synchronized, we use Apple's MobileMe service. MobileMe also provides Back To My Mac, which is pretty handy. It lets you share files or the desktop screen of a Mac back home from anywhere on the net.

I should really say it would be pretty handy. I'd never been able to get it to work. Googling around, lots of other people were in the same situation. It's a little fussy about network setup and router types, but my configuration should be good. Regardless, this is what the MobileMe preferences aways showed:

Not very helpful.

Then yesterday, I upgraded two of the Macs to Snow Leopard. Now checking the same preferences screen:

Well, that's a better problem description. DNS for Wx.Ca is provided by our ISP, Shaw TV. Googling around, there seem to be other people having 'issues" with Shaw's DNS servers.

I reconfigured the MacBook Pro to use OpenDNS for DNS service instead. It took about 30 seconds. Instant success:

I wonder what Shaw's DNS servers could be doing to keep Back To My Mac from working?

Comments (0)

Aug 25 / 8:01pm

Wx.Ca Now Brought To You By A Mac Mini

This past weekend, the Wx.Ca server got upgraded. It had been running on a Red Hat / Fedora Core Linux PC since (I think) 2002. That was the second hardware generation. First came an even older and bigger and slower Linux PC. The current one's twin, which was my development server, was getting temperamental and the main server was due for replacement after running 24 hours a day for 7 years.

So both servers, each one bigger than a bread box (nobody remembers bread boxes) have been replaced with one little Mac Mini and a few accessories:

Here we have:
  • The Shaw cable modem.
  • A small Linksys ethernet 10/100 switch to allow 2 computers to get the Shaw allotted 2 IP addresses.
  • An Apple Airport Extreme that serves as a firewall and performs Network Address Translation for the rest of Wx.Ca. It also port forwards HTTP requests to...
  • The Mac Mini (previous generation) running a 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo with 3 GB of memory (the max that this older generation Mac Mini can address).
  • An external Firewire 400 drive for Time Machine backups.
After 2 days, it's working great.

Poking up from the background, you can see that the 5 power bricks with their 5 line cords and 5 device cords take up more space than the active gear.

The conversion from Linux to Mac OS X (Leopard) was very easy. The Mac comes with Java and the Apache web server. I just had to add MySQL for the database, Ploticus for the charts and Apache Tomcat as the Java Servlet container.

I also moved the CVS source code repository from the development Linux box to this Mac Mini. I'll continue to do the Java coding and builds in Eclipse on a MacBook Pro.

I have a Kill-A-Watt to measure the power consumption, but it's not plugged in at the moment. I'm sure the power saving will be substantial. On the next scheduled outage I'll add it in.

Comments (1)

Aug 24 / 5:13pm

The News Blog is Back

Sorry to anyone who tried to follow the old Wx.Ca News blog. (Was there anyone besides you, Corey?) I hadn't posted since a month or two after it was set up, and that was years ago. It used Blogger, but with the posts actually hosted on Wx.Ca. Since the last post, Blogger is now Google and uses Google accounts. I can't seem to resurrect my old Blogger ID. Oh well. Time to move on.
 
This time, I'm going to try a hosted service and a new cool one. posterous at www.posterous.com. Posting is just sending email. No arcane markups. Pick any email client you like, including Mail on a Mac or an iPhone. It lets me specify my own URL like news.wx.ca for reading the blog even though posterous is hosting everything. Photo albums by just including more than one photo in an email. It looks pretty good, except every posterous blog looks every other one. No theming that I can see.
 
Let's see what happens.

Comments (2)

Aug 24 / 4:20pm

Gotta Start Somewhere

My first post to www.posterous.com so you know - a test message.
 
And a gratuitous really big pic.

Comments (3)