Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

UPS: no, not the company that delivers parcels all over the world. I'm talking about Uninterruptible Power Supplies.

It was about time the house had one, so I took the plunge and purchased one. In fact, I did this about two weeks ago. It arrived a few days later and was still lying in its box in the hallway until yesterday.

It wasn't just laziness that kept it in its packaging. It's an APC Smart-UPS RT5000 XL, which is quite a heavy-duty unit. As such, it needed its own heavy-duty electrical group in the house, which meant that a qualified electrician had to come to perform the work.

One of the parts that the electrician needed for the job took a week to arrive, so it wasn't until yesterday that the work to install the UPS was completed. At last, the UPS, a hulking great thing weighing in at around 60 kg, could be lugged downstairs to the cellar and installed in the cupboard under the stairs. More bright LEDs to peer back at me from the darkness!

I seized the opportunity to have the electrician rewire one of the other electrical groups, so that one of the sockets in my office is now routed via the UPS. This means that my desktop computer, monitor, telephone and fax can all connect to it, which saves me from having to buy a separate unit for the office. That's very cool.

Downstairs, my Linux server, the ReadyNAS NV+ storage server, a USB-attached hard drive, an Ethernet switch and the DSL modem are all connected to the UPS. Assuming I haven't forgotten a vital piece of infrastructure, we should now be able to continue to use the Internet and make phone calls in the event of a power-cut.

All of the above equipment is good for a load of about 12% (the load fluctuates depending on whether I'm compiling code, whether the monitor's turned on, etc.), which means that the UPS's battery will provide back-up power for about 95 minutes. I can get an extra 15 minutes out of it if I turn off inessential equipment in the office.

I actually made a blunder when researching this product. It has a network management card, which is basically an Ethernet card with some bells and whistles, such as a port for attaching a temperature probe. I thought it additionally had a USB port for direct monitoring via a cable, but I somehow imagined that detail. Smaller units do have this feature, because they're typically missing the Ethernet interface.

The only reason I wanted the ability to monitor the UPS over a USB cable was because that's what the ReadyNAS box requires in order to be able to automatically shut down when the UPS's battery is running low. Large disc arrays really don't like it when the power just disappears and I wanted my box to be able to gracefully shut down.

Where there's a will, there's a way, though; well, sometimes, anyway. I set out to find a fix for the problem today.

It turns out that the ReadyNAS uses Network UPS Tools (or NUT for short) to perform its UPS monitoring. Reading NUT's documentation, it became apparent that it has a number of back-end drivers for monitoring UPSes. One of these is snmp-ups, which, as the name suggests, uses the SNMP protocol to monitor UPSes.

My APC UPS can be queried and configured using SNMP, so this seemed like a good avenue to explore.

snmp-ups supports a number of MIBs. If you don't know what a MIB is, think of it as a formalised set of questions that can be asked of a device. One of snmp-ups's MIBs is called apcc, which is designed for use with APC units. Bingo.

Well, snmp-ups is an experimental driver and its man page warns that it's not suitable for production use, so I wasn't sure whether it would work. However, once I had installed NUT on my Linux server, configured it and started the server daemon, upsd, I was able to query for the status of the UPS from any host on the network.

The ReadyNAS has a feature that allows it to monitor a UPS attached to a second or subsequent ReadyNAS unit elsewhere on the network. Since those units are also running NUT, all the ReadyNAS is doing when it performs this remote monitoring is contacting the NUT server on the other unit. By installing a NUT server on my Linux box, I was hoping to pass it off as a second, UPS-backed ReadyNAS unit in the eyes of my ReadyNAS.

I went into the ReadyNAS's FrontView interface, went to System -> Power -> UPS Configuration and gave it the IP address of my Linux server as the system to be monitored. Sadly, an error message popped up, informing me that a connection couldn't be established.

I delved into my sysadmin toolkit and pulled out a perennial troubleshooting tool, tcpdump(8). This utility is used to analyse network traffic.

Within a few seconds, I was able to see where the communication was going awry: the ReadyNAS expected the system it was querying to have information available about a device called UPS. I had called my UPS apc in the NUT config.

Once I had renamed the monitored device and restarted upsd, the ReadyNAS was happy to believe that the NUT instance on my Linux server was, in fact, a second ReadyNAS box with which it could communicate.

Here's the pudding containing the proof:

I'm very happy I was able to get this to work, because having auto-shutdown on the ReadyNAS was the one thing that had prompted me to invest in a UPS in the first place. It would have been a bummer if precisely that feature hadn't been available to me.

I also want my Linux server and desktop to automatically shut themselves down in the event of a power-cut. I could use NUT, but because the snmp-ups driver is marked experimental, I consider it safer to use the very mature apcupsd software. After all, apcupsd is designed specifically for use with APC UPSes.

apcupsd is actually a package I had on my list of things to investigate eight years ago when I was working at Linuxcare, but it's taken me until now to actually delve into it. It's very easy to configure and does exactly what it's supposed to do.

There's also a nice little GTK2 GUI client that will talk to an instance of apcupsd. It's called gapcmon and is trivial to get up and running. You can put an icon for it in your tray and call it up whenever you want check the status of your UPS.

In conclusion, a UPS isn't a very interesting device to add to your network. It's expensive, heavy and you hopefully won't get much use out of it. As is often the case with insurance, however, it can be very painful to discover after a catastrophe that one should have had it. For that reason, I feel good about my purchase.

Besides, this UPS has a few interesting aspects to it. For a start, it's networked, which is always a desirable quality. It also works with Linux without the need for any proprietary software, which is another very desirable quality.

I hope that Netgear will add the snmp-ups driver to a future release of the ReadyNAS firmware. That will obviate the need for an extra computer to function as a NUT server.

Both of our children had appointments at the Consultatiebureau last week.

Lucas is now 4.5 months young, weighed in at 7530 g and measured 65 cm in length. By way of comparison, at the same age, Eloïse was nearly 1400 g lighter and a couple of centimetres shorter. Yes, Lucas is a strapping lad.

Eloïse has reached the ripe old age of 3 years and 3 months old, weighs 15.5 kg and measures 97 cm. She'll soon shoot through the one metre barrier.

Not so nice was when the doctor diagnosed suspected abductiebeperking or, in English, abductive limitation of the hip in Lucas . She wasn't able to spread Lucas 's legs as much as she felt she should be able to.

Six days of putting the matter out of our mind ensued, as we tried not to think about the possibility that Lucas might have hip dysplasia (heupdysplasie). The orthopaedic department of the VUmc holds its weekly surgery on Wednesday mornings and Lucas 's suspected condition was diagnosed last Thursday, so there was nothing we could do, but wait.

So, off we went on the bakfiets yesterday morning, to have our jolly, permanently smiling little man checked out.

We first saw a very pleasant young doctor on one side of the Boelelaan, who, after prodding and exercising Lucas 's hips, could find nothing wrong with him. It's standard procedure to perform an ultrasound, though, so we left the building, crossed the Boelelaan and headed to the second floor.

There, we were reunited with all of the parents who had gone before us on the other side of the road. Happily, it didn't take very long before we were seen. By this time, Lucas was very tired and quite vocal in his sadness about not being allowed to doze off.

His ordeal didn't last long, however, and, much to our relief, no abnormality was found. His hips were given a clean bill of health.

This was one time I didn't mind having been sent somewhere for nothing. The health of one's children is an indescribably precious thing, but usually one taken for granted. It's not until one sees other children emerging from the doctor's office, their father carrying a cumbersome hip brace, that one remembers how lucky one is to have ferociously healthy, irrepressible children.

Consider me reminded.

There's an infrequently recurring problem with our home-made MythTV DVR that is, despite its rare occurrence, quite irritating.

Under certain circumstances that I haven't been able to meticulously define, and when multiple tuner cards are simultaneously recording TV programmes, the machine can hang when another tuner card fires up to record yet another programme. It's rare, but it happens. I think there's some kind of race condition in the underlying Linux ivtv driver.

After living with the problem for a couple of years (which just means rebooting the machine less than once a month on average) things came to a head during our recent holiday when the MythTV box went down not once, but twice during our absence.

I had to call a friend and ask her to go over to reboot the box. On the second occasion, she couldn't make it over until a couple of days later, so a lot of programme recordings were missed while the box was frozen.

That, for me, was the straw that broke the camel's back. A solution had to be found, so I did some research one evening in a hotel and eventually found myself reading about the ePowerSwitch-1 Guard, manufactured by the German company, Leunig.

This is an overpriced, but pretty cool device. Basically, you plug it into the mains, network it and then plug some other device into it. At this point, you're able to log into the ePowerSwitch via its built-in Web interface (or via a serial cable or small Windows executable) and tell it to turn off, turn on or simply restart the device that it manages.

If that was all it could do, it would already be quite a useful device, but, in my use case, I could still lose a few days of recordings if, due to travelling, it took me a few days to notice that the MythTV box had gone down and get to an Internet connection to reboot it.

Therefore, the pièce de résistance of the ePowerSwitch is its guard function. Essentially, this is a network monitor that checks the status of the device being managed and reboots it if it stops responding. Monitoring can be performed using ping, port scanning or both.

Now, if our MythTV box hangs, it will be rebooted within a minute with absolutely no involvement or intervention from me.

The device is very easy to configure and is up and running within a couple of minutes. I did have to buy a new power cord for the MythTV box, though, because the ePowerSwitch doesn't have a normal plug socket for the device to be managed.

The only other thing I needed to do was modify a setting in the MythTV box's BIOS, so that the machine would automatically turn itself on when power was restored after having been removed. Otherwise, the box would remain off after the ePowerSwitch cycled the power.

Leunig has other models of the ePowerSwitch that can manage four or eight devices. You can even configure master and slave set-ups. It all depends on what you need to control.

It took me a little while to find an on-line dealer prepared to sell one of these to a private individual rather than a company, but I did eventually find one and the device had already been delivered to a neighbour when we returned home from holiday.

In short, the ePowerSwitch-1 Guard does exactly what it says it does. It's rather overpriced, but there's nothing else quite like it on the market, thanks to its guard function. The four and eight device models are better value, but for my needs, the single device model was exactly what I needed.

Since 1st July, the Netherlands has been smoke-free in cafés, pubs and restaurants; blissfully smoke-free. No more smokers!

We left on holiday a couple of days before the ban was introduced and were away for six weeks, so it's actually only been since this Monday that we've been able to go out and experience smoke-free lunch at our favourite places. And what a delightful experience it is.

With the cafés and restaurants now smoke-free, the next areas to target for cleansing are:

1. playgrounds
2. parks
3. café and restaurant patios and terraces
4. the street

In that order, of course.

If other European cities are anything to go by, the café terraces will have been rendered uninhabitable for anyone with a properly functioning olfactory organ. As those who wish to commit a slow, malodorous form of suicide are driven outside, current legislation allows them to take their acrid stench with them.

While we're on the subject, why don't smokers regard fag butts as litter? Fag ends now constitute the majority of street litter in some large European cities, yet little if anything is done to either prevent or penalise those who litter the street on account of their filthy habit.

If I sound vehemently anti-smoking, you're right on the mark. Rigorous anti-smoking laws are one of the few areas where the Americans and the Nazis got it right.

As far as I'm concerned, the only place smokers should be allowed to smoke is inside private residences; and even then, there's an argument against it if there are children living there.

There's a girl who's very happy to be home tonight and that's Eloïse . Her toys lie strewn across the floor, she's been racing around on her wooden bike, and has been beaming from ear to ear since the moment she got through the door.

It was six weeks ago to the day that we embarked on our summer trip. That was long enough ago that I'm flicking the wrong light switches and looking in the wrong cupboards for drinking glasses.

We covered more than 5000 km over the last six weeks, 20% of that in the last three days, just getting home. It was a great trip, but, as good as it was, I'm also glad to be home.

Poor old Lucas . Before this trip, the furthest he'd been in a car was Schiphol airport. He probably didn't have more than 50 km under his belt when we left. Now he's seen Ireland and Northern Ireland, plus selected bits of England and Wales.

It was another long drive today. We took an earlier train than planned through the Channel Tunnel and made good progress from Calais into Belgium until an accident somewhere near Bruges slowed us down for a good half hour.

Lucas needed regular attention, but was nowhere near as fussy as the last couple of days, so we didn't have to stop as much en route.

Things started to choke up around Antwerp -- a lot of people were coming back from their holidays -- so that was as good a moment as any to take a break. We dropped in at a Quick, the Belgian variety of fast-food burgers, primarily to let Eloïse pee, but then she noticed their admittedly fantastic playing area and asked -- no, demanded -- to play there.

That sealed our fate. Bad burgers and a ninety minute delay ensued. Still, our little girl emerged as happy as Larry, having shaken off some of her energy.

The rest of the drive was dull and uneventful. The roads were busy, but thankfully there weren't too many caravans or other slow moving vehicles. We eventually arrived home at around 18:30 and Lucas woke up on cue.

Mountains of post awaited us, along with countless hours of television recordings. There's a lot of stuff to catch up on.

Eloïse goes back to peuterspeelzaal tomorrow afternoon and is very excited at the prospect.

Lucas , if only he knew that all of the driving was over for the foreseeable future, would also, I'm sure, be elated.

It really is great to get back. I've never really had a holiday before that I was glad to get back from; and that says nothing about the quality of this one, which was terrific.

Rather, it says more about the fact that, these days, we have a home we both love, plus a daughter who is also very attached to her home and belongings. I suppose we're a lot more settled these days than we used to be. After four weeks away from home, I didn't really feel it all that much, but in the last few days I've been looking forward to getting home. Perhaps that's just because I knew that's what we had planned for ourselves; I don't know.

Thanks to Fenella, Tim, Cameron, Willow, Lucy, Toby, Tony, Bernie, Ronan, Shane and Jason for making our stays with you such a memorable experience. I'm sure we'll be back.

I rather underestimated the leg of the journey from Opa Tony's house to Cardiff.

With more than a tinge of sadness, we left Opa Tony's around 11:00 and headed south on the N11 to Rosslare. In spite of a slew of slowcoaches on the single lane stretches, we made fairly good time and were able to stop off on the way in Ennischorthy (Inis Córthaidh) for lunch.

Our 15:00 sailing from Rosslare became our 15:45 sailing from Rosslare. I should have checked the sailing times before we left. Still, it wasn't a major delay.

The boat arrived in Fishguard at 18:00 instead of 17:00 and we were one of the last cars off, due to having been boarded in the last nook of the boat that could have a car stashed in it. The catamarans may be faster than the normal boats, but they're much less convenient for loading cars.

Anyway, we rolled off the ferry around 18:15 and began the drive to Cardiff, which was a good couple of hours away to the east. I began to wonder about the wisdom of my decision not to have us simply overnight in Fishguard.

Lucas , as is so often the case, gave our driving plans short shrift. With both lungs, he gave loud voice to his objections, forcing us off the road in Llanddewi Velfrey for a pub supper.

Rather unusually, Lucas wouldn't settle after dinner, so it was a very unpleasant, teeth-gnashing, mouth-foaming, white-knuckle ride, rife with interruptions, all the way to junction 33 of the M4, where our lovely Travelodge room lay waiting within the confines of the Moto M4 services area. We finally arrived at 23:00 with both children finally asleep.

Travelodge: I can't really recommend them. I would say you get what you pay for, but they're actually not all that cheap, so you don't.

The plumbing of the shower, when turned on, made sounds like a battle-weary submarine taking on water. There are no toiletries provided, either; a fact that didn't actually catch us unawares, as I'd read their FAQ when I made the booking.

The room was inexplicably hot and the window didn't open more than a slit.

Our family room was a joke. Eloïse 's bed was a lousy, uncomfortable sofa that didn't even pull out into a makeshift bed. Sheets and a duvet were provided, though, so we quickly made it up as a bed for her.

Mercifully, our bed was actually very comfortable, so we did get a good night's sleep, which is the most important thing after a day like the one we'd had.

A notice on the bathroom door informed us that we could opt to leave our used towels on the rack instead of on the floor if we were staying multiple days. This would be taken as a sign that we were happy to reuse our towels and didn't require new ones.

Tempting, though it was, to stay multiple days and explore all of the many attractions vying for our attention at junction 33 of the M4, we elected to continue our onward journey as planned.

Travelodge offers no breakfast, but it's just as well really, when you think about it. Besides, having slept at the motorway services area, we were ideally situated to choose between all kinds of other really bad food from renowned purveyors of haute cuisine such as Burger King and Costa Coffee.

Breakfast was predictably poor, but therefore also not a disappointment.

It was to be another lamentably bad driving day.

Lucas was not going to grant us the miracle of a multi-hour nap, the way he had when we had driven from Cornwall to Cardiff many weeks earlier.

The weather was bad, too; quite atrocious, in fact. It was to rain without abatement for the entire day. Not one moment, throughout the entire journey from Wales to the far south-east of England, did the rain let up. This made motorway driving conditions less than ideal at best, and really quite hazardous at various points along the way.

Somewhere just inside England on the M4, some tosser had jack-knifed the caravan he had been towing, leaving his car with its back end raised in the air and his caravan on its side with all of its windows smashed.

That little episode landed us in a traffic jam that took 50 minutes to clear, adding the better part of an hour to a journey time we already knew would be long.

Suffice to say, that there were to be many encounters with rest-stops, motorway services and petrol stations, all under the umbrella of Lucas appeasement.

We eventually rolled into Folkestone at 17:25, Lucas finally having slept for the last 150 km of the drive. Any doubts I might have had about whether we should have tackled the drive from Fishguard to Cardiff yesterday had long since dispersed, as I realised what a long day today would have been if we had also had to do that leg on top of everything else. I don't think any of us, least of all Lucas , could have dealt with the extra driving. Poor fellow.

Seven hours after our arrival, it's still pouring with rain and there's a strong wind blasting at the windows of our room. I hope things improve tomorrow, but the forecast gives little cause for jollification.

The Channel Tunnel is just 5 km from here. We'll take that in the morning and drive up towards Amsterdam in the afternoon.

Eloïse was certainly surprised to be met by Opa Tony again today. On the drive up from Kilkenny, she had started to talk about what she would do the next time that she saw Opa Tony, but little did she know that it would be the very same day.

It's been a lovely day, catching up with Tony, Bernie and my new brothers; the perfect end to a great trip, really.

Tomorrow, we head for home, which is a long way from here. With about 1200 km to cover, including a ferry crossing and the Channel Tunnel, we won't be getting home tomorrow (or even the next day).

We'll spend tomorrow night somewhere just off the M4 in a motorway services Travelodge hotel near Cardiff.

The next night, we'll be in Folkestone, just around the corner from the channel tunnel.

Sunday will be the final leg of our trip, as we cross through the tunnel and then drive from Calais to Amsterdam.

It's been a great trip, but I am looking forward to getting home and sleeping in my own bed. Eloïse , too, is looking forward to playing with her toys and returning to play-school.

This posting probably signals my last whiff of Internet access until we reach home.

The woman who ran the guesthouse we stayed in last night told me that Americans usually account for 70% of her business. This year, however, they stayed away in droves, because of the weak dollar. Americans literally can't afford to leave the US.

On top of that, it's been a bad summer so far. The combination of poor meteorological and economic conditions has badly hit Irish tourism. It's probably the same story all over Europe.

In Kilkenny, you could be forgiven for not noticing that tourist numbers are down. Tourists appear to be everywhere; and plenty of them sound American, too.

Kilkenny (Cill Chainnigh) is a delight. It's Ireland's smallest city, both by area and population. In terms of charm and appeal, however, it wins hands down from the likes of Dublin and Cork.

The main tourist draws here are St. Canice's Cathedral and Kilkenny Castle (Caisleán Chill Chainnigh), but whilst those are both very nice, the most pleasurable experience can be had for free, sauntering along the city's mediaeval streets, taking in the many nice buildings and the pleasant, unforced atmosphere.

In short, Kilkenny is the real thing. No tourist itinerary should be without it.

Tomorrow, it's back to Greystones (Na Clocha Liatha) in Co. Wicklow (Contae Chill Mhantáin) for one final day with Opa Tony, Oma Bernie and the three uncles. We've kept it a secret from Eloïse , who is going to be bowled over when we roll up outside their front door and she realises where she is. I daresay the family will be happy to see her, too.

And that will round off our Irish trip. On Friday, we'll drive south to Rosslare (Ros Láir) and catch the ferry back to Fishguard in Wales. And thus begins the long journey homeward.

I'd write more, but the battery on my laptop is about to peg out and I have to sit near the door to our room in order to pick up the wireless signal. Unfortunately, there's no plug socket here.