February 6th, 2010
1 Comment
Introduction
In the Plugwise protocol unleashed series, I will describe the plugwise protocol. As far as I have been able to re-engineer it. I did this re-engineering work because there is no Linux/OSX software available to control your plugwise devices. All information in these series are based on the 2.0 firmware version!
DISCLAIMER: use of the information in these articles is at your own risk.
This information is not supported by Plugwise B.V. in any way.
In this part of the series we will have a look at the device information request and response.
Circle internal clock
February 1st, 2010
4 Comments
Introduction
In the Plugwise protocol unleashed series, I will describe the plugwise protocol. As far as I have been able to re-engineer it. I did this re-engineering work because there is no Linux/OSX software available to control your plugwise devices. All information in these series are based on the 2.0 firmware version!
DISCLAIMER: use of the information in these articles is at your own risk.
This information is not supported by Plugwise B.V. in any way.
In this part of the series we will have a look at the device information request and response.
Device information request
The device information request looks like this:
January 30th, 2010
2 Comments
I’m currently playing around with Jeenode boards. The JeeNode is a small wireless board with an 8-bit Atmel RISC microprocessor. JeeNodes are compatible with the Arduino platform and can be programmed under Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux using sketches created with the Arduino IDE. As a first test of it’s capabilities, I wanted to read out the state of the cover of my recycle bin.
I have one of these recycle bins:
http://www.easybin.nl/Easybin_2009-2010/assortiment.html
(deluxe 50)
The cover automatically opens when it detects motion over it.. this is nice and hygienic.
I decided to open up my bin. Once opened I quickly notices the most interesting part of the bin.. the motion sensor and the LED that flashes when the bin is in the open state.
January 25th, 2010
No Comments
Today I wanted to give someone remote console access using vSphere web access.
I granted him virtual machine user access, which should be sufficient. However after installing the component for remote console view. The session failed with the following error:
January 24th, 2010
2 Comments
Introduction
In the Plugwise protocol unleashed series, I will describe the plugwise protocol. As far as I have been able to re-engineer it. I did this re-engineering work because there is no Linux/OSX software available to control your plugwise devices. All information in these series are based on the 2.0 firmware version!
DISCLAIMER: use of the information in these articles is at your own risk.
This information is not supported by Plugwise B.V. in any way.
So what is plugwise anyway?
December 17th, 2009
2 Comments
In my company we are using SCOM for monitoring our server environment.
Off hours we also get notified about critical alerts using a SMS/GSM modem.
Using default SCOM functionality we delay the sending of notifications by 5 minutes. This works fine for alerts with a “new” state.
However if an alert is closed within the 5 minute period a “closed” notification is sent out.
We do not want to see the closed alerts if an alert auto-resolved within the 5 minute time period. But if a new alert that has aged 5 minutes and sent to our GSM, we definately want to see that closed alert if it auto/manual resolves into the closed state (to make sure someone actually did something about the alert)
Using default SCOM functionality, this is not possible. This is why we came up with the following idea (special thanks to my colleague Frank):
- Using two seperate subscriptions, one for “new” alerts and one for “closed” alerts.
- On the new alert subscription set a channel with a powershell script to update custom field 1 when a SMS has been sent (this subscription has the 5 minute delay)
- On the closed alert subscription set a condition to check custom field 1 to see wheter a SMS has been sent or not.
This blog post describes how this can be done within SCOM.
November 27th, 2009
1 Comment
I was looking for a way to e-mail an overview of all exisiting snapshots (on virtual machines) in our virtual environment.
VMware provides an excellent powershell cmdlet pack (known as PowerCLI), you can download the latest version (as of today) here: http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/2009/11/powercli-40-u1-is-out.html
I used PowerCLI to write a script that does the following:
- Loop through all virtual machines to check if there a snapshots created for a specific virtual machine;
- sum up all of the snapshots for a machine containing snapshots;
- e-mail a report of the above.
Here is the script:
November 17th, 2009
No Comments
Today I wanted to create an fresh image for Windows 2008 x86 deployment.
We work with Microsoft’s SCCM to install Windows updates on server systems.
I was looking for a way to embed the SCCM client within the base image.
Microsoft has some information available on the subject right here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb694095.aspx
There is not alot of information available on step 3 of this documentation. To complete this step you need the command line tool called “ccmdelcert.exe” which is available in the Systems Management Server 2003 Toolkit 2 (SCCM 2007’s precursor), you can download the toolkit here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sms/bb676787.aspx
Here’s a short result of the command-line tool:
November 5th, 2009
2 Comments
Because of the huge amount of requests I get for this piece of software I’ve put POL (Plugwise on Linux) back online.
You can find it in the “Downloads” section.
November 5th, 2009
1 Comment
I am currently building a new vSphere farm at my company. This also includes the storage part, which can become a load of work:
- First you have to fix up the physical cabling;
- next, you have to setup up the zoning;
- up next you have to present the virtual disks to the VMware hosts.
Last but not least you need to take care of pathing for your presented virtual disks. For our HP EVA SAN, vSphere defaults to the “Most Recently Used (VMware)” policy.
In the past we used to manually load balance using fixed paths.
