Spacing it out

We've managed to fill up all of the hard drive space I put in the NAS (Jerry) Thankfully it hasn't been too critical and we have been able to continue as normal basically without noticing that we can't store anything more on there.

However this is something that does need to be fixed. So I bought some more hard drives. I'm using Western Digital Greens from ebay with the head park adjusted with WDIDLE3 to extend their life. I know these are not ideal drives for use in a NAS, but they are cheap and the RAID 6 configuration means that I have time for a new drive to arrive if one dies.

Here I am setting the head park idle time to reduce the number of head parks which can wear out these green drives quite quickly as the default time is very short. It makes sense when you think they are designed for absolute minimum power consumption, but it can be a problem.

I don't have a computer set up as a test bench for doing stuff like this so I have to pull some cables out of my normal use desktop.It's not too bad to have to do. But all the same having the space for a dedicated machine with swappable drive bays for this sort of thing would be nice.

Make sure you label your CD's!!! I had a dozen or so un-labeled disks I had to go through to find my boot CD. They have now all been labeled and put in a sensible spot.

The new drives are in. This means that I just need to expand the array and it will all be done, right? Not quite. Turns out that you can't expand an array using a p400 RAID controller if the battery backup for the cache is busted. Thankfully these parts can be had for only a few dollars from ebay.

The replacement part.

Drag the whole mess out.

Apparently orange = bad.

And here we have it. The new part in and all ready to go. It was a pretty simple replacement however there were one or two parts that had to be jiggled the right way to come free.

Here we are, expanding the array. Unfortunately I think the whole data set has to go through the cache on the card which is only 256 mb or thereabouts. The array is approximately doubling to about 4.5 tb which is a lot to have to shift through 256 mb. I'm expecting this should be finished copying by the end of the weekend but that is pretty much a guess.

Once the RAID card has expanded the drive I think I will need to expand the filesystem so I will do a writeup on that because I will need to remember as well.

Cheers,
Rex

Make sure you fix your mistakes

The other week I was putting a sight glass back in a tank when I managed to overtighten one of the bolts and snap it off. I didn't really need to tighten up those bolts that much so it really shouldn't have happened. But accidents happen.

You can see what's left of the bolt snapped off in the bottom right of the fitting.

We came back to this problem over the weekend and fixed it. But fist I had to use a hammer.

Not a particularly heavy one, but big enough to make me nervous about breaking the removal tool which would have been next level bad.

Thankfully this part went well. Once the tool got in far enough to get a good bite it spun the bolt and the whole shebang came out. Then I had to get the bolt off the end of the removal tool. Awkward, but much less stressful than getting the bolt out.

And here is everything buttoned up and no longer holding up progress.

I had a bit of a play with the oil burner as well so keep an eye out for updates on that through the week.

Cheers,
Rex

You have to maintain a jacket?!

I had to re-waterproof my rain jacket at the end of last year. (More detail on the process here and here). This style of jacket needs to have the waterproofing re-applied about every 6 months or when the jacket dries out too much again.

So it is a bit overdue for getting this re-done so I tried to get through it after work last night.

First though I had to re-melt the beeswax waterproofing. To do that I had to move all of the stuff that's on top of the Barbeque because I've been using it as a workbench.

That's better.

Last time I did this I felt the jacket was still a little too waxy after melting it in so that means I needed to add some more drying agents. Probably the best thing to add would be some more gum turpentine but I don't have any of that so I added a bit of linseed oil.

All of a sudden I looked back in the melting pot and a heap of wax had welled up from the bottom and was cooling again on top of everything. It did look a bit cooler in person.

Then things got a bit too exciting. Stirring to try and speed up the melting process and a little splashed over the side and managed to set the whole lot on fire. Not that surprising really considering everything in that mix is classified as flammable. Even the wax burns once it's got a bit of heat in it.

Now not as exciting. Much better.

The fire seemed to make the mixture somewhat blacker than before so it will be interesting to see, once it cools if the whole batch has been darkened.

Wipe on.

Melt in. Repeat for the next section of the jacket.

I only got a bit of the jacket finished before it got too late and I had to go to bed. But what I have done feels and looks much better and more waterproof again. I'm just hoping I will get this finished before I need to stay dry again.

It was a bit of a pain doing this because it was fairly cold and I was essentially outside. Next time hopefully I will be doing this somewhere it's a bit warmer so the waterproofing will melt into the jacket easier.

Cheers,
Rex

Well it does everything a boat should

It sure does, it floats, sails and breaks. There wasn't much wind but the hull is driven really easily. Even with the very light wind we were still moving along. Not very fast mind you, but we did get there until better wind came along.

This was the first time out in a new boat and it's been some time since I've been sailing on a dinghy so we took a chase boat along as well. 

Here she is, tarped up and with the mud washed off ready for bed. I do need to get a bigger tarp but I should be able to sort that out in the next few days.

Now being a boat there is always something broken. Today we managed to break off one of the jib sheet redirection blocks. These were mounted to pieces of an old kitchen chopping board which turns out couldn't handle the strain. The turning blocks for the spinnaker sheets are in nearly the same spot so we can use those until I can make up some new mounting blocks.

Also the centerboard is very tight in the casing. It was fine to start with, but after lunch it ended up taking us nearly half an hour to get it down, but thankfully after that we got some good sailing in. So the board will need to be taken out and sanded down so that when the timber swells there will still be space inside the casing.

However this is the biggest problem. One of the pintles that hold the rudder on had come loose and nearly fallen off by the time we came in at the end of the day. Unfortunately when these were installed with plain nuts when these should've been locknuts or had jamb nuts installed. Thankfully we didn't loose the pintle so a simple trip to the hardware store will supply the parts to fix this properly.

Cheers,

Rex

Big Changes in my serving

No I haven't re-built the kitchen. For the last 18 or so months I have been running a number of servers from this:

It doesn't look like much. And in terms of "real" professional servers it isn't. However it has been more than good enough for me. Unfortunately there are some things I am not really that happy about. Recently I have become very fond of Arch Linux and have been enjoying some of it's features more than the Debian that is installed on this server. I know Debian is probably better for servers, but I'm just doing this at home for fun. So I'll do what I want.

The other main thing I haven't been so happy about is storage.

This is what the case looked like after I opened it up for the 1st time in 18 months. Probably a record for one of my computers. As you can see, arranged across the bottom is my network storage array. A jumble of random drives that has very little rhyme or reason, other than I could get my hands on them for the right price.

What they look like out of the case.

This is going to be changing soon. I have bought a case on ebay that will hopefully work as a NAS box. This will be my next big server thing to do. Also depending on how I'm going, this jumble of random drives will probably be dispersed somewhat and the old 20GB drives either retired from server, or relegated to use as boot drives with regular backups. Probably boot disks.

Another thing I will be probably looking at is airflow. Mainly with regards to dust. The house I live in is not new and has had plenty of time to start producing dust. Also this house doesn't have a dedicated server room with filtered AC. Bummer. This however is nothing new and hopefully I can reduce the amount of dust in this case (and the new one) with some slightly (?) informed planning of case ventilation.

I haven't decided on what software I'm going to run on the NAS box yet. That will have to wait until I get it. But I am starting to realise that the hodge podge of HDDs and no actual backup is really, really quite bad. So I dare say that both of those things will change in the future, even if I keep them like this for now.

However if you do happen to have a bunch of reasonable sized HDDs burning a hole in your pocket I know a quiet place where they can go to stay.

Cheers,
Rex

Re-Waterproofing an oilskin Jacket - Part 1

In the last post I mentioned that I had some beeswax coming. I needed to get this because my rain jacket has dried out and is no longer waterproof at all. To re-waterproof the jacket I made up a mixture based on this video. Below is how I went about making it, along with some changes that I will be making.

I ordered 1Kg of beeswax as the other sizes available were considerably smaller. They were also much more expensive. This is what it looked like after the packaging was removed.

It has a bit of a funny feel to it when you hold it. Sort of sticky, but it doesn't leave residue on your fingers like a softer wax would. Or the waterproofing will once we finish mixing it up.

Because the wax was wider than the pot I melted it in I needed to make it narrower. To do this I split it down the middle. In order to split it I needed to cut it. I just used a knife that came with my toolbox and was close to hand.

The block was quite firm while I was doing this so I had to score it on both sides as deep as the knife I was using could go before I could separate the 2 halves. Here you can see how thick the block was.

As you can see, not 100% consistent thickness. But plenty good enough for melting.

At this stage I put the wax into the pot I got for this and put that on my bbq grill as that is the only burner I have that is outdoors and wasn't too hot.

What I should've done is also cut the halves down across the middle so they were short enough to fit into the bucket completely. What happened is that has the blocks touched the rim of the bucket it would melt and run down the outside of the bucket. Less than ideal. So I stood there holding them upright with a screwdriver until they melted enough to be below the rim of the bucket.

Here wed can see them melted down a bit more. I didn't need to hold them any more by this point.

Nearly finished melting. It took a while, not sure exactly how long but it felt like quite a while.

This is where I took it off the heat. If you look closely you can see graduations stamped into the side of the bucket. Rather than the 1L approx. that I assumed (With no real basis.). The wax actually melted to a little over 1.5L. This wasn't a problem really as I had 1.5L of Boiled Linseed Oil, however, I only had 1L of Turpentine. I will talk about that more down the track, but I think that is significant.

Here I took the wax off the heat and started adding the Linseed Oil and Turpentine. I added the entire 1L bottle of Turpentine and probably a bit more than that of Linseed Oil. I had a half empty bottle and I bought another full one so I had plenty of that.

This is what it looked like after adding the Linseed Oil.

Then after adding the Turpentine.

As you can see there is still about 0.5L left in the top of the bucket so between that and the stuff I used there will be enough room to make some changes to the mix based on how it went onto my jacket. When I re-melt it to change the ratios I will take another picture so we can see just how much I used on the jacket.

I am going to put how it goes onto the jacket on another post. This one is getting a bit long I think.

As always, if you have any questions or suggestions please leave them below in the comments.

Cheers,
Rex

It doesn't matter what you know

It only matters what you do. With this project I was reminded once more of the difference between being around and helping someone do something; and actually doing it yourself. Although just because you don't know exactly how to do something including all the little trick, that doesn't that you can't do it or shouldn't have a go at it.

I recently installed our clothes line properly. Before the socket for it was just put in the dirt and packed a little. This meant that there wasn't much holding it straight up. To fix this at the time we just put some rocks and sticks against the base which kinda, sorta helped. It still lent over if you didn't load it evenly and didn't spin very well.

The solution? Use that dodgy old bag of rapid set concrete that's half open in the back shed and dig a hole that's actually deep enough. Believe it or not, it worked fine. Even in the absence of PPE, qualified people or even properly stored materials. It only matters what you decide to do.

The first thing I did was to dig a hole and actually check that it was going to be deep enough. I checked it a number of times just to be sure.

After I'd dug the hole to the required depth I looked at the bag of cement, back at the hole then back at the cement and decided it probably wouldn't all fit in that sized hole. So to ensure no wastage and also to help stabilise the block of cement in the ground. I "belled" out the bottom of the hole a little so that if you were to look at the cross section of the hole the bottom has an outward flare like a bell, rather than straight sides.

After I was happy with the hole I put some water in there, more than I needed planning to let it soak into the walls of the hole so it doesn't dry out while the cement sets. Unfortunately because it's been raining recently and the ground is nice and moist it didn't soak in very well so I probably had more water than I needed for the amount of cement. I think this is what cased some of the concerns I had later.

With the water not soaked into the walls I added the cement to the hole and started to mix it through with a shovel. This was a mistake. I should've put the socket in before I put the cement in which would've saved a bit of futzing around trying to get it deep enough in the cement. Also, with hindsight it may have been easier to just mix it up in a bucket with the correct amount of water, put the socket in, then pour the cement around it.

With the socket worked deep enough that it wouldn't be sticking up out of the ground I put the rest of the clothesline into the socket so that I could get it vertical. I don't have a spirit level so I just eyeballed it from a few directions. Then to make sure it stayed there while the cement set I put a few of the blocks that were holding it back around the base.

At this I left it overnight. Then when I came back the next afternoon to have a look at it I started to get a little concerned. The concrete hadn't set yet. Apparently this stuff takes more than the 15min it says on the packet. This could've been because it was old or just as likely because there was too much water and it was taking too long to dry out. So after that discovery I left it until the next day.

After the second day and it was firm, but not set I figured it probably wont set properly; but it will still hod as firm or firmer than rammed dirt. So because I mis-judged how big the hole was I filled it the rest of the way with dirt and rammed it down. I don't have any proper tools for ramming dirt so I just used a brick I had lying around from building the forge. This packed it in plenty nicely enough for my taste and with the dirt the clothesline became much more stable.

So now it's completed and I've even got a load on there at the moment that is only on one side so it's about as unbalanced as it will get and it hasn't swung to a low point or lent over. Looks like my eye is calibrated fairly well. 

So remember, just because you've never done something or even been shown how to. It doesn't mean you can't. Just remember what you need to finished product to be and be prepared to change the plan to get there if things don't happen how you'd expect.

Cheers,

Rex

P.s. Sorry about the bad photos. I had a shocker while taking those.

It's getting better

So you may notice that the Jeep has moved; and there is not a huge stream of ATF leading to it. Unfortunately as you can see there is still a small leak and there were a few little spots on the ground in work's carpark. But I think that s getting caused by dodgy pipe dope that I used to seal the fittings rather than the plumbers tape I used last time which didn't seem to leak.

Eventually I'll be happy with the state of the car... Probably not before I find a new owner though. A little more work and she'll look like new I think.

Cheers,
Rex