Koos van den Hout - Homepage

Ok, I'm usually not the flash and embedding type, but after a bit of trying this one is nice:

My first association when I heard that jingle...

I noticed that the new Western Digital WD15EADS disk spun down way too fast. After some serious testing I found: when I set the "Advanced Power Management" level (using hdparm -B) to 127 or less the "standby (spindown) timeout" (set using hdparm -S) is ignored and the drive spins down after about 5 8 seconds of inactivity. Way too soon when playing a movie, with mplayer the movie stalls about every 10 seconds because a new bit of movie has to be read from disk which causes another start/stop. The smartctl start/stop counter goes up at the same rate. Feels like a firmware bug to me or a difference of opinion between hdparm and the disk. But the hdparm report suggests that these settings should work on the disk:

ATA device, with non-removable media
        Model Number:       WDC WD15EADS-00S2B0                     
        Firmware Revision:  04.05G04

        Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, with device specific minimum
        Advanced power management level: 126

           *    Power Management feature set

I asked Western Digital customer help about this but the first (standard?) answer is from Support for WD products in LINUX or UNIX which comes down to "we don't support anything else than jumper settings for these operating systems".

A lot of further searching with google suggests to me that the 'IntelliPark' feature is causing the drive to park its heads after 8 seconds of inactivity which is not a useful default when streaming video from it with a reasonable cache. And the 'Load Cycle Count' will go up fast, which may result in the drive reaching the 'suggested maximum' within a year. I don't need to test the warranty that fast.

As a workaround I set the Advanced Power Management level back to 128 and installed spindown which is a utility which watches the disk activity from userspace and issues a spindown command when no activity (from /proc/diskstats, so for linux at the device level) was measured over the configured period of time. Now it spins down when the filesystems have been idle for 10 minutes which is a lot more usable.

The resulting power save from adding a new sata disk, moving the data and removing the old pata disks is not spectacular (yet): the 5 pata disks (all with activated automatic spindown) had the UPS at a 40% load, the current 2 sata and 2 pata disks (also with automatic spindown) have the UPS at a 42% load. It'll be interesting to see what happens when the 2 pata disks can be removed. The main original idea was to save a bit of power and make the system less complicated, let's see if that first part works out in the end.

Filesystems have been moved to the new huge sata disk in home server greenblatt and I found time this evening to remove three old ones. There may be a race condition in the startup scripts where lvm2 is not completely up and running when the filesystems are mounted from the fstab but I saw that happen only once.

My very own security incident involving China (in a way):

[Jan 28 09:55:45] NOTICE[7593] chan_sip.c: Call from '' to extension '00442078420960' rejected because extension not found.

An attempt (within the public sip context) to call a number in England. The Chinese embassy in London. All attempts failed since the asterisk which logged that has no idea how to call the big phone network. Information from a lecture on SIP security suggests that this kind of attempts is a sort of ddos attack on a phone number.

I looked at the project sundial power calculations again and did some more calculations: even when I take the parts with the lowest energy usage and get the average usage down to 5.4 Watt, the investment in solar panels to get even through December and January in the Netherlands would mean it would take somewhat over a 100 years to 'earn back' the investment in the solar panels. So maybe it is a better idea to power the weatherstation from the grid and make sure the earth connection is really good to avoid damage to the power grid at home should lightning strike it. Still using wifi for data transfer would be a wise idea.
Update: About the same goes for wind power: because we live in the city and can't put up a 10 meter high pole for a wind generator the generator would become quite expensive.

Maybe IPv6 traffic will get another boost now: for participants in the Google over IPv6 program the records for youtube now have been added:

$ host www.youtube.com
www.youtube.com is an alias for youtube-ui.l.google.com.
youtube-ui.l.google.com has address 74.125.77.100
youtube-ui.l.google.com has address 74.125.77.101
youtube-ui.l.google.com has address 74.125.77.102
youtube-ui.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:8001::8b
youtube-ui.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:8001::8a
youtube-ui.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:8001::65
youtube-ui.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:8001::71
youtube-ui.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:8001::64
youtube-ui.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:8001::66

Video is streamed from cache servers like:

$ host v1.lscache1.c.youtube.com
v1.lscache1.c.youtube.com is an alias for v1.lscache1.l.google.com.
v1.lscache1.l.google.com has address 82.94.228.144
v1.lscache1.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:4001::10

All reachable via IPv6. I'm almost tempted to try to try to play a youtube video via a v6-only connection and see what breaks.

In following some links about 1-wire projects I found a German Supplier of 1-wire components which can be interesting: Fuchs Elektronik sells 1-wire components at a reasonable price such as the DS18B20 1-wire high resolution thermometer. Too bad they don't sell other interesting sensors like the barometer which could help in combining an order.

Wardriving results 14 December 2009 - 1 February 2010: 4450 new networks with GPS locations according to WiGLE. In the WiGLE stats I went to 13th place and passed the 180000 networks mark.

WiGLE also did a very nice upgrade: the new WiGLE wardriving maps are based on google maps.

We volunteered ntp.cs.uu.nl for extra capacity for the Turkish ntp pool, and the results are quite visible in the ntp.cs.uu.nl statistics. Suddenly peaks are near 5000 packets per second. But ntpd (and the freebsd kernel) deal with it without problems.

And I'm back from a snowboarding holiday in Fiss in Austria. A great wintersport area, connecting Fiss, Ladis and Serfaus. We had great weather, first sun and later snow, resulting in fresh powder for the last few days. Snowboarding in fresh powder is really great. I got some much needed rest too.

Tien jaar geleden haalde ik mijn rijbewijs (en gebruikte ik dus ook al newsitems op mijn homepage). Dus het was tijd voor vernieuwen. Ik kreeg daar keurig een brief over van de RDW maar die was met alle verbouwingsdrukte blijven liggen. Vorige week ontdekte ik dat 2010-01-10 geweest was en ik dus geen geldig 'roze papiertje' meer had. Snel voor pasfoto's naar foto boekhorst die prima pasfoto's volgens de huidige regels en toen naar de gemeente Utrecht voor de aanvraag. Ondertussen rond, dus nu is het 'roze papiertje' vervangen door een 'roze creditcard'.

I upgraded ntpd on ntp.cs.uu.nl from 4.2.4 to 4.2.6 and suddenly I notice in the output that this has changed the stratum from 2 to 1.

$ ntpq -c rv ntp.cs.uu.nl
status=011d leap_none, sync_atomic, 1 event, event_13,
version="ntpd 4.2.6@1.2089-o Fri Jan 15 14:31:14 UTC 2010 (1)",
processor="i386", system="FreeBSD/5.4-RELEASE-p13", leap=00, stratum=1,
precision=-19, rootdelay=0.000, rootdisp=1.456, refid=PPS,
reftime=cefb066f.cbe638ff  Fri, Jan 15 2010 16:21:19.796,
clock=cefb0693.889dd5ee  Fri, Jan 15 2010 16:21:55.533, peer=7047, tc=6,
mintc=3, offset=-0.001, frequency=15.448, sys_jitter=0.002,
clk_jitter=0.001, clk_wander=0.002

Which matches the peer list where the PPS stratum is now 0:

$ ntpq -c peer ntp.cs.uu.nl
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
*huygens.cs.uu.n .PPS.            1 u   23   64  377    0.197    0.009   0.258
+stardate.cs.uu. .PPS.            1 u   13   64  377    0.998   -0.058   0.033
+tijger.phys.uu. metronoom.dmz.c  2 u   15   64  376    0.599    0.004   0.185
 LOCAL(0)        .LOCL.          10 l  627   64    0    0.000    0.000   0.002
oPPS(0)          .PPS.            0 l   49   64  377    0.000   -0.002   0.002
 NTP.MCAST.NET   .MCST.          16 u    -   64    0    0.000    0.000   0.002

I guess some definition of PPS input has changed. Now I wonder how much more ntp traffic this will cause.

Het winterweer houdt nog steeds strak vol, en dus kijk ik naar mijn vervoersmogelijkheden. Met de gladheid gebruik ik zowiezo maar de rechtopfiets en niet de ligfiets, rechtop voel ik me dan toch iets veiliger. Ik vroeg me eerst af waar alle meldingen over gladheid op fietspaden in Utrecht vandaan kwamen totdat ik van de week naar iets anders wilde fietsen dan naar mijn werk in de Uithof. In de gemeente Utrecht worden alleen de fietspaden goed schoongehouden. Op zich een prima actie. Maar, er zijn daarnaast nog veel meer fietsroutes waarlangs zich dagelijks grote aantallen fietsers voortbewegen. Als die fietsroute toevallig een achteraf straat is waar geen doorgaand autoverkeer hoort te zijn dan zit deze ook buiten de routes waar schoongemaakt zal worden. Een erg duidelijk voorbeeld is te zien rond het Salvador Allendeplein in Utrecht: de fietspaden daar, onder andere langs de Kardinaal de Jongweg zijn prima geveegd. Maar de Troelstralaan, wat voor veel fietsers de route is naar de binnenstad is een ijsbaan.
Ik had graag een kaartje uit openstreetmap toegevoegd maar daar ontbreken nogal wat fietspaden in dit gebied. Projectje voor wanneer het beter weer is.

The new disk in the homeserver greenblatt was another case of a disk not wanting to go to sleep after the set period. Some searching found two answers: spindown, a daemon to monitor disks for inactivity and spin them down with sg_start --stop or hdparm -y. But the other answer was a better answer: hdparm standby timeout not working for WD raptors? has as answer:

* I also know of quite a number of drives where hdparm -B settings override the -S settings, even if you set the -S settings after the hdparm -B settings. You could try combinations with various values of hdparm -B, especially 1 and 255.

And the manpage of hdparm has this bit:

-B Set Advanced Power Management feature, if the drive supports it. A low value means aggressive power management and a high value means better performance. Possible settings range from values 1 through 127 (which permit spin-down), and values 128 through 254 (which do not permit spin-down). The highest degree of power management is attained with a setting of 1, and the highest I/O performance with a setting of 254. A value of 255 tells hdparm to disable Advanced Power Management altogether on the drive (not all drives support disabling it, but most do).

Default on the WD drives is indeed 128, which does not permit spindown on idle. I changed it to 127, see if that helps. I prefer it if the drives decide for themselves when to spin down.
Update : Yes, the changed advanced power management setting helps, now the drive spins down when not in use.

Vanmorgen via het centrum met de bus, met de ov-chipkaart. Behalve het privacy aspect is het namenlijk verder een handig systeem, al zouden sommige dingen handiger kunnen voor de reiziger als een en ander vanuit het perspectief van de reiziger was ontworpen.
Maar op een bepaald moment vielen de ovchip kaartlezers in de bus uit. De chauffeur was naast het rijden bezig met een touchscreen waar een status op rood stond. Blijkbaar is er toch communicatie met de buitenwereld nodig voor werkende ovchip kaartlezers. Uit de originele verhalen begreep ik dat bussen genoeg hadden aan een gps ontvanger. Opvallend is ook dat de automatische halte-aankondigingen van de bus het toen niet meer deed. Toen kon ik dus ook niet meer uitchecken bij het uitstappen, of de kaartlezer van een andere gvu bus gebruiken om uit te checken, want ik zag overal rode ledjes. Bij een volgende busrit in een bus waar de ovchip automaat niet werkte zwaaide ik dus maar even met de ovchip kaart naar de chauffeur die me zo doorzwaaide.
Maar nu heb ik dus een uitcheck actie gemist. Kijken of de restitutie actie daar ook voor werkt.
Update 2010-01-13: Restitutie geprobeerd: volgens de ov chipkaart restitutieformulieren (afgrijselijke deeplink binnen een framesite) moet ik een bonnetje uitprinten met de laatste 10 transacties:

Let op: stuur uitdraai mee van laatste tien transacties. U kunt een overzicht van uw laatste tien transacties uitdraaien bij de oplaad- en verkoopautomaten op metrostations en bij Verkoop- en Informatiepunten.

Alleen: waar doe je dat. Op de ov-chipkaart adresvinder kan ik geen vinkje aanzetten 'transactie overzicht uitdraaien'. Die in de Uithof bij de bibliotheek kan het niet, de automaat bij de GVU klantenservice in het centrum kan het ook niet, dan maar in de rij voor het loket van de GVU klantenservice. Waar ze een stapje verder gingen: ze konden gelijk de mislukte transactie repareren, waardoor ik het hele formulier niet meer nodig had.

The sensors at home are updated with data from the new disk. The cause of the relatively high temperatures is that 3 disks (2 pata and 1 new sata) are in one cage together. I hope to rearrange disks so the airflow improves and they cool better. I might need a bit longer sata cable to make that happen.

Work on home server greenblatt: time for less disks with more storage. So I bought two sata disks, one huge one to store the camera archive and scratch files, and one for the system and home directories. The choice for two disks is so the one with the camera archive and the scratch files can fall asleep when not in use, to save a bit of power. Installing both new disks at once wasn't going to happen due to space and cabling considerations so I started with the big one. When that one is done I can remove three pata disks from the system. I also updated the system bios to the latest version which made the system clock a lot more stable, ntpd now runs without having to use tickadj. Bios updates are easy these days: this bios can update itself from a USB stick. I chose logical volume management (lvm2) again for managing the big disks so it will be easy to expand storage when needed without getting a big tree of filesystem mounts.

Anybody know any leads in receiving data from a weather station which uses "instant transmission" on 868 MHz? I'd like to receive data from such a weather station. In linux, on the server. Some device which would receive the data and present it via a serial port would be great.
Update: the wonderful thing about standards.. I learned that there is no standard for data from weather stations on 868 MHz and that a sensor from brand A will not be received by a receiver from brand B. Time to be more specific: the weather station is a TFA-Dostmann "Stratos". I already e-mailed a technical contact at TFA-Dostmann about this.
Update 2010-01-14: Answer from TFA-Dostmann: it is impossible to receive the data from that weather station on a computer.

Yesterday during the meeting of the hcc pcgg netwerkgroep I saw something which I could not research at the time and it bugs me: one person had Windows 7 running and the network connections screen said "IPv4 Connectivity: Internet" and "IPv6 Connectivity: Local". But that is the wrong answer: Due to my work on the openvpn ipv6 tunnel there should be full IPv6 Internet access. So now this is bugging me and I'm trying to find out how exactly Windows 7 determines whether IPv6 is 'local' or 'Internet'. The system was on the wireless network and the connection just started to work so maybe IPv6 router announcements with a global IPv6 address were missing. Or maybe more is needed like a v6 nameserver.

The Netherlands, Vlieland with less snow
Image credit: NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response

More satellite image browsing: the Modis rapid response system image gallery offers a lot. Nice detail in the latest images showing the Netherlands such as the Aqua/Modis pass at 2010-01-08 12:45 UTC: Vlieland has a lot less snow!.

Image credit: NERC Satellite Receiving Station, Dundee University, Scotland

Interesting snow cover in the Netherlands, with more coming up. This satellite image from this morning shows a serious white cover and some clouds. The big rivers are visible as darker lines and the ice growth on parts of the IJsselmeer shows.

I tried to use the --filter option in rsync but I was a bit baffled by the syntax and the manpage is nice but I couldn't understand. I wanted certain directories completely, other directories default excluded and certain files in one directory but not all. After some trail and error and talking to the teddybear:

rsync -rvv --progress /home/koos/rsyncsource/ /home/koos/rsyncdest --filter='merge /home/koos/rsyncfilter'

And in the filter file name things to include and exclude:

+ /wel/
- /niet/
+ /random/file
- /random/*

And the result is what I want:

$ ~/bin/testrsync 
building file list ... 
[sender] showing directory wel because of pattern /wel/
[sender] hiding directory niet because of pattern /niet/
[sender] hiding file random/niet because of pattern /random/*
[sender] showing file random/file because of pattern /random/file
7 files to consider
delta-transmission disabled for local transfer or --whole-file
random/
random/file
           0 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=4/7)
wel/
wel/file1
           0 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#2, to-check=2/7)
wel/file2
           0 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#3, to-check=1/7)
wel/file4
           0 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#4, to-check=0/7)
total: matches=0  hash_hits=0  false_alarms=0 data=0

sent 319 bytes  received 126 bytes  890.00 bytes/sec
total size is 0  speedup is 0.00

Now to do this on a filesystem with 151000 files.

Google knows where your AP lives, and it's not that hard to query it! Geolocation API Network Protocol can work based on a query with one AP mac address. Testing it with a random access-point near work gives me: http://samy.pl/mapxss/?mac=00%3A1A%3A1E%3A15%3A90%3AE2. Found via Hacker pilfers browser GPS location via router attack - The Register where the user is not asked for permission to trace the location when a wireless router is used. And indeed: 'Scary how accurate it is'.

The year 2010 seems to be an unfathomable far future, I just found another Y2.01K problem. The zonecheck tool gives a warning which reads '2010 is not a valid year':

w> The format of the serial number is not YYYYMMDDnn
 | Ref: RFC1912 (p.3)
 |   The recommended syntax is YYYYMMDDnn (YYYY=year, MM=month, DD=day,
 | nn=revision number).
 `----- -- -- - -  -
 :   The serial 2010010502 doesn't seem to be in the YYYYMMDDnn format.
 `..... .. .. . .  .

And the code indeed shows:

    # DESC: recommanded format for serial is YYYYMMDDnn
    def chk_soa_serial_fmt_YYYYMMDDnn(ns, ip)
        serial = soa(ip).serial
        return true if (serial > 1999000000) && (serial < 2010000000)
        { 'serial' => serial }
    end

The far future is happening today.
Filed as Ubuntu bug #503501.

Nieuws maken kan ook prima in Nederland. Vanmorgen in het ontbijtnieuws en ook in de Volkskrant: 'Drankmerken redden imago met voorlichting’ met:

Producenten van alcoholische dranken die hameren op het verantwoord gebruik van alcohol, doen dat alleen om hun eigen imago op te vijzelen.
Dat stelt STAP, het Nederlands instituut voor alcoholbeleid

Nee, STAP is gewoon de "Stichting Alcohol Preventie". En dan is het ineens een stuk duidelijker waar deze mening vandaan komt. Een moderne uitvoering van de blauwe knoop dus. Maar als je jezelf een beetje neutraal benoemd als 'instituut voor alcoholbeleid' en mooie rapporten schrijft dan lijk je ineens geloofwaardiger en nemen het ANP en wat kranten je zwaar bevooroordeelde rapport over. Uit de categorie "wij van wc-eend adviseren wc-eend".

The well monitored heating system worked a lot better during the night, so the problems are fixed. Only the heater pump ran a few times which I think is part of the frost-protection. The isolation in our house is good: the living room temperature only dropped from 19⁰C to 16.8⁰C over the whole night while it was below 0⁰C outside.

Hot water system fixed: the 3-way valve controlling how the heating/boiler system heats water was broken due to calcium buildup. Now replaced and suddenly things work as expected again.

A day with temperatures staying below 0 ⁰C and the first working day is not the right day to call the heating company about a hot water problem. They sounded very very busy on the phone

More scientific research into the problems with the heater show that the sensor detecting hot water being used seems to be malfunctioning: the system starts for hot water use about every 5 minutes even when not a drop of water is used in the house. Time to call for a repair. I hope the company which does repairs to heating installations isn't too busy with problems due to the current temperatures, those are well below freezing at the moment.

Fireworks launch

The change of the year is celebrated in the Netherlands with fireworks, it is the one day per year all people of at least 16 years are allowed to light fireworks.

And I wish everybody reading this a great new year!

During all the work in the house some of the 1-wire temperature sensors were disabled and removed to avoid damage. Today I did some work on the house and re-installed them. The sensor in the living room is now installed inside the room thermostat so it's hidden and should give the same reading as the thermostat. I also re-installed the temperature sensor in the crawlspace which will show up in the sensors at home overview.

Ik heb toegegeven en voor mezelf een wikipedia account aangemaakt zodat ik de ontbrekende gegevens over de RTBF en VRT dvb-t uitzendingen kon toevoegen aan de pagina over DVB-T frequenties. Het blijft me opvallen dat deze informatie zeer slecht te vinden is. Dan maar wat extra google juice voor deze informatie : DVB-T guard rate, coding, error correction for VRT / RTBF Belgium.

Y2.01K problem: SpamAssassin had a rule since 2006 that e-mail with a date in the 'far future' was likely spam. The 'far future' was defined as 2010-2099. So today that rule started firing, leading to missed e-mail. Documentation for SpamAssassin Rule: FH_DATE_PAST_20XX. Time for an update there...

VLC can be a bit hairy to configure, but with some trial and error and a bit of google juice I found the right playlist file to instantly play radio2 from multiplex 1:

$ cat digitennemux1-radio2.vlc 
#EXTM3U
#EXTVLCOPT:dvb-adapter=0
#EXTVLCOPT:dvb-frequency=706000000
#EXTVLCOPT:program=1113
dvb://

Use with vlc --m3u-extvlcopt digitennemux1-radio2.vlc and enjoy the Top2000. Without the --m3u-extvlcopt vlc finds those commands scary.

Maandag was de Oliebollentocht 2009 van de NVHPV. Als rijder van een 'open' ligfiets mochten we niet meerijden maar we zijn wel op het Domplein en bij Vleuten gaan kijken naar het voorbijrijden van alle velomobielrijders wat natuurlijk zeer fotogeniek is. Op het Domplein was de 'foto-opportunity' waar ook pers voor uitgenodigd was. Mijn dag was ook weer helemaal goed: ik werd ook aangezien voor persfotograaf. Oliebollentocht 28 December 2009 foto's Koos van den Hout (speciaal voor Oscar).

Nog een paar zendmast foto's: tijdens onze ligfietsvakantie door Duitsland zijn we ook langs de Sender Höhbeck gefietst. Op 12 Augustus 2009 heb ik Sender Höhbeck met zendmasten Gartow 1 en Gartow 2 gefotografeerd. Toen ik thuis achteraf ging zoeken welke masten we gezien hebben stond er volgens de wikipedia pagina nog maar 1, na goed lezen bleek Gartow 1 op 20 Augustus 2009 opgeblazen te zijn. Aan deze zendmasten zat een hoop koude oorlog historie, ze onderhielden een televisie, radio en telefoonverbinding tussen West-Duitsland en West-Berlijn. Daarnaast was het ook de zender voor de ZDF in de regio waardoor deze 'toevallig' ook in een aardig stuk van de voormalige DDR te ontvangen was.