Floorplanner.com Design a 3D blueprint Free!

I have been playing with Floorplanner.com
It's a well done website that allows you to draw your own plan in 2D then view it in 3D.
The learning curve is not to bad, even if you have never used a CAD program before.
It had even improved since the first time I tried it to draw my basement floor plan.
I managed to draw a computer lab to show concepts to my colleagues.
Create an account to try it free.
If you really like it you can pay for "Plus accounts" and get more space for more plans.
Check out a diagram I did here, be sure to click 3D. I used the Green telephone booth's to represent server racks. As with many 3D flash websites, it really helps if you have a fast CPU and lots of Ram.

Unclogging the kitchen drain

A clogged kitchen drian could mean a costly visit from the plumber.

As a son of a plumber I couldn't be seen to have to call in someone else.

(Besides, Dad's retired and hung up his drain rod long ago.)

In the "old days" we put the trap directly under the kitchen sink so you could fix it in the kitchen. Well, in my 6 or 7 year old house it's different. The trap is in the basement.

It tried poking a hanger wire down through the cleanout under the sink but to no avail.

I made a quick call to dad to see if he still had a drain rod. He suggested instead I go down to the basement and unscrew the trap. Thankfully It's still unfinished above the laundry room.

Here he reminded I needed to hang a bucket under the trap when I unscrew it.

Once unscrewed I was able to shift the horizontal drain to one side and get my fingers into the gunk to pull it out.

Question: How many drinking straws can you get down a drain before it clogs?

Answer: Eight Straws, 3 popsicle sticks and several old grey vegtable remains.

Uggh ! well its fixed and it only cost me a hour of my time.

Cleanup a moldy basement

Helping my brother renovate his basement on the weekend.
We debated on whether to rip out the old stucco drywall or just put new drywall overtop.
Happily our younger help was up for more demolition.

Glad we did ....

We discovered black mold on the concrete behind the drywall. This can be a big health hazard especially for underground dwellers living everyday in basement apartments.

The cause:
The previous basement finishing job left an incomplete area behind the furnace that had only insulation on the outside wall covered with an old curtain. --- No vapor barrier plastic -- no drywall !
This left a large area exposed to outside air movement around the Air conditioner pipes and tiny gaps between the concrete walls and the wooden base of the upper house.
This air movement allowed the cold winter outside air to mix with the warm humid inside air causing moisture to form on the walls.
Over time this encouraged mold growth blackening the concrete wall behind the drywall.

The Fix:
We cleaned it with a spray bottle of bleach and water mixed. Within minutes we saw the wall change from black to the old gray concrete.
After some searching of the internet I realized how dangerous cleaning mold can be. Had I read it first I would have taken more precautions (wearing air masks, hanging plastic sheets creating negative pressure etc.)
Of course the bleach smell was strong and we opened all the windows. we could have done other things. I read that Hydrogen Peroxide is great for killing bacteria.
Hydrogen Peroxide is apparently much safer than bleach because it does not give off gas a bleach does that can burn your lungs.
Hopefully none of us get sick later from our cleanup.

Repairs:
We used spray foam to seal the gaps around the AC pipes and gaps in the wall.
Fresh insulation , vapor barrier and drywall is being installed.
This time it will be completely closed and sealed.
Next we will need to rip out the old wall in the laundry room because we see black peeking out from that side.

The moral of the story:
If you are renovating a basement and are considering leaving the old walls, DONT.
Its the opportunity see whats going on behind. It may not be pretty!

Smoke and Mirrors - Veritas Disaster Recovery: Part 1: An unbootable root disk

I know my Data is there! I just mirrored it! At least it said it did?

Sometimes for whatever reason Veritas volume manger will mirror successfully but the mirror disk wont boot.
Perhaps you forgot to run vxbootsetup or it just didn't work correctly.

What if your primary root mirror now died and you had to get the data off the alternate disk but it wont boot!
Using some spare hardware here's what I went through.

I moved the un-bootable (Solaris 8) SCSI disk (mirror) from my Sunfire 4800 (D240 tray) into a spare Sunfire V240 system in my lab. It has 4 SCSI disk slots so it's a perfect recovery platform in this case.
We installed Veritas Volume manager 4.1 on Solaris 10 and encapsulated our root drive.
Here's the gotcha, to keep the new rootdg (Veritas root data disk) separate from the disk we are recovering we changed the default name rootdg to spamdg instead.

Once our Solaris 10 system disk was encapsulated and booted we could plug our bad mirror into a spare disk slot, plug a new disk into another spare slot and ufsdump the data to a new disk.
Heres the main steps.

• The V240 installed with Solaris 10 was installed with Veritas VXVM 4.1
• The root disk (disk0 slot) was encapsulated with rootdg renamed to spamdg (call it what you want, just NOT rootdg or bootdg)
• The recovery source disk was installed in slot 2
• A new target disk same size or larger was put in slot 3
• system was booted and rootdg was imported
• root / , var and opt filesystems were mounted.
• new slices are created on the target disk.
• target disk is newfs 'ed and mounted
  
• ufsdump is used to copy the data to the new disk
• new disk is manually un-encapsulated.
• New disk is returned to original Sunfire 4800 system and is bootable.
• New disk is remirrored for redundancy

Recovery platform:

• I used a Spare Sunfire V240 which runs Solaris 10 (could have been Solaris 8 or 9.)
• It has 4 disk slots I am using only disk0 as the boot disk. 4 slots are numbered disk 0,1,2,3.
  
• I have the install CDROM for Veritas Storage foundation 4.1
  

Detailed steps
1. Remove the un-bootable Solaris 8 disk from the F4800 system's D240 media tray.

2. Install Veritas Volume manager (VXVM) on the V240 using the Veritas Storage Foundation install cd.

You will not be able to read the data on the disk unless you are on a system running Veritas Volume Manager. Encapsulate the root disk using the menu vxdiskadm. When asked to create the rootdg (root data group) change the default name to prevent confusion with the rootdg from your source recoverdisk.

4. Plug in the Solaris 8 disk (Recovery source disk) to slot3 of the V240

5. If you have hot plugged the disk run this command to get Solaris and vxvm to see the disk.

# vxdiskconfig
VxVM INFO V-5-2-1401 This command may take a few minutes to complete execution Executing Solaris command: devfsadm (part 1 of 2) at 11:14:15 EDT Executing VxVM command: vxdctl enable (part 2 of 2) at 11:14:29 EDT
Command completed at 11:15:08 EDT

6. Import the rootdg of this disk
# vxdg -Cf import rootdg VxVM vxdg WARNING V-5-1-560 Disk rootdisk1: Not found, last known location: c0t0d0s2

The error is because the disk had formerly been one of a mirrored pair.

7. Do vxdisk list and vxprint to see the disks and volumes

# vxdisk list

DEVICE TYPE DISK GROUP STATUS

c1t0d0s2 auto:sliced spamdg01 spamdg online

c1t3d0s2 auto:sliced rootdisk3 rootdg online

- - rootdisk1 rootdg failed was:c0t0d0s2


# vxprint -g rootdg
Disk group: rootdg <<<<<<<~~~~~~~~~~~~here it is ~~~~~~~~ TY NAME ASSOC KSTATE LENGTH PLOFFS STATE TUTIL0 PUTIL0
dg rootdg rootdg - - - - - - dm rootdisk1 - - - - NODEVICE - -
dm rootdisk3 c1t3d0s2 - 35363560 - - - -
sd rootdisk1Priv - DISABLED 4711 - NODEVICE - PRIVATE
v opt gen DISABLED 8528720 - ACTIVE - -
pl opt-01 opt DISABLED 8528720 - NODEVICE - -
sd rootdisk1-03 opt-01 DISABLED 8528720 0 NODEVICE - -
pl opt-02 opt DISABLED 8528720 - ACTIVE - -
sd rootdisk3-01 opt-02 ENABLED 8528720 0 - - -
v rootvol root DISABLED 14338616 - ACTIVE - -
pl rootvol-01 rootvol DISABLED 14338616 - NODEVICE - -
sd rootdisk1-B0 rootvol-01 DISABLED 1 0 NODEVICE - Block0
sd rootdisk1-02 rootvol-01 DISABLED 14338615 1 NODEVICE - -
pl rootvol-02 rootvol DISABLED 14338616 - ACTIVE - -
sd rootdisk3-03 rootvol-02 ENABLED 14338616 0 - - -
v swapvol swap DISABLED 4094728 - ACTIVE - -
pl swapvol-01 swapvol DISABLED 4094728 - NODEVICE - -
sd rootdisk1-01 swapvol-01 DISABLED 4094728 0 NODEVICE - -
pl swapvol-02 swapvol DISABLED 4094728 - ACTIVE - -
sd rootdisk3-04 swapvol-02 ENABLED 4094728 0 - - -
v var gen DISABLED 8194168 - ACTIVE - -
pl var-01 var DISABLED 8194168 - NODEVICE - -
sd rootdisk1-04 var-01 DISABLED 8194168 0 NODEVICE - -
pl var-02 var DISABLED 8194168 - ACTIVE - -
sd rootdisk3-05 var-02 ENABLED 8194168 0 - - -

8. Start the volumes so you can mount them (or reboot then the volumes are enabled.)

# vxvol -g rootdg start rootvol
# vxvol -g rootdg start swapvol
# vxvol -g rootdg start var
# vxvol -g rootdg start opt

9. Mount the volumes so you can now get at your data

# mount /dev/vx/dsk/rootdg/rootvol /mnt

# cd /mnt

# ls -l
You should now see your root disk data
You can do the same for var and opt .Now back it up or begin rebuilding a new boot drive


NEXT:
Veritas Disaster Recovery: Part 2: rebuilding the boot disk .... Stay tuned

Install Solaris 8 bootblk from cdrom while still booted

I have been experimenting for some time with Veritas Volume Manager and root disk encapsulation on our aging Solaris 8 systems.
Since I am using a copy of a disk from a hefty SunFire 4800 on a smaller V240 I am encountering some strange issues. Perhaps I will bolg about all the tricks soon.
Heres one.
I want to reinstall a bootblock on a newly mirrored rootdisk.
However since I am running a disk built on the wrong architecture some device paths are not normal or broken.

One odd result is that veritas vxbootsetup is refusing to install the boot block.
Since I have had to do this several times it is very slow booting from cdrom i wanted to install it without rebooting first.

Issue:
After mirroring the boot drive you want to make the new disk bootable.

# /etc/vx/bin/vxbootsetup -g rootdg -n

/usr/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk: File not found
eeprom(1M) not implemented on SUNW,Sun-Fire-V240
/usr/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk: File not found
eeprom(1M) not implemented on SUNW,Sun-Fire-V240

Solution:
Dont rerun vxbootsetup or it will try to create even more partitions on the new disk.

No need to reboot from CD ROM
Normally you would boot from cdrom to do this like this.

ok} boot cdrom -sw
...

# /usr/sbin/installboot /usr/platform/`uname -i`/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk /dev/rdsk/c1t3d0s0

Instead put the cdrom in the drive without rebooting and install it as follows (all on one line)

# /usr/sbin/installboot /cdrom/sol_8_204_sparc/s0/Solaris_8/Tools/Boot/usr/platform/SUNW,Sun-Fire-V240/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk /dev/rdsk/c1t3d0s0

I hope I just save you an extra CD reboot.
But you better test the disk to be sure it boots I have encountered some strange booting issues.

Furnace Troubleshooting and the "Know Where Man"

(This picture is not my panel thankfully)

I was working on finishing may basement last Weekend. I was improving the wall insulation around the electrical panel, pushing insulation in behind the wires on the panel board.
Shortly after my wife called downstairs and told me the furnace fan would not come on.
I never connected it since i had not tripped any breakers.

Well, then began the furnace troubleshooting. I called a young friend with some training on HVAC and we looked it over.
- No lights on the furnace.
- Open the furnace panels.
- Check the power: 110V coming in.(So we thought.)
- Check power going to the furnace panel safety switch: 110V
- switch to 24VAC transformer 110V coming in Zero VAC coming out: AH HA! Bad Transformer we thought
- Wrote down the part number.
- My wife called a local Electrical supplier who could get the part.
- Picked it up next day for $50.
- Put it in .... SAME PROBLEM! What? thats not it? where did we go wrong?

Dumbfounded and given up now on self repair we called in a professional Furnace man.
first thing he checked (of course) was the power coming in ...
"Only 96V coming in " he declared. "REALLY ?" I sceptically replied. Wondering "is he checking this right?"
Immediately he went back to the on off switch and opened it up. "still only 96V."
Over to the Electrical panel he removed the panel cover. here he found a loose (black) wire on the breaker. Rechecked it: still only 96V. Poked around in the rats nest of wires the builder had installed.
Here he found an even looser (white) Neutral wire (Slightly discolored from heat).
Tightened the wire and presto! furnace lit up.

We wrote out a check for $125 to the furnace man while my Wife scolded me for not finding it.

Now our error : was how we checked the power coming in. We tested the AC line in from the black wire to ground! (for ground we used the furnace body).
We should have checked across the Black and the White wire! we would have seen the lower voltage.
Loose wires on a panel are bad thing. I'm glad we found this!
---

As for my wife complaining about paying $125 for a guy to tighten 2 screws it reminds me of this story about Henry Ford's "Know Where man" ...

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=183998
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp

"Nikola Tesla visited Henry Ford at his factory, which was having some
kind of difficulty. Ford asked Tesla if he could help identify the
problem area. Tesla walked up to a wall of boilerplate and made a
small X in chalk on one of the plates. Ford was thrilled, and told him
to send an invoice.
The bill arrived, for $10,000. Ford asked for a breakdown. Tesla sent
another invoice, indicating a $1 charge for marking the wall with an
X, and $9,999 for knowing where to put it."

"Know Where Man" Urban Legend, hosted by snopes.com

Virtual Lunchtime Vacation

Here's a fun thing to do when winter gets you down.
How about a virtual vacation?
I was trying out Google Maps Streetview at lunchtime.
I was cruising down Atlantic avenue in Key West Florida.
I saw a small Kiosk at the side of the street that said "Nature Preserve."
So I Googled "Nature Preserve Atlantic avenue Key West" and found a Blog with enough pictures to tour around inside.
Just enough sunshine to improve my winter Mood :)
OK now I'm ready for spring!

Systems may Experience 95 Year Time Jumps

I received a very strange SunAlert Email today
One entry on the list explains a lot of strange entries I've been seeing in historical documents for 1914 on Wikipedia.
Better patch those systems before history starts changing!

1914 Yikes! Is that A V240 I see behind the Archduke Ferdinand?

"This jump will also be reflected in system and application logfiles and database records."
For example:

$ tail -3 /var/cron/log

CMD: [ -x /usr/lib/gss/gsscred_clean ] && /usr/lib/gss/gsscred_clean

root 10996 c Tue Apr 28 03:30:00 1914    

root 10996 c Tue Apr 28 03:30:00 1914

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Sun Alert ID: 253628

Title: Certain Solaris SPARC Systems may Experience 95 Year

Time Jumps

Product: Solaris 8 Operating System, Solaris 9 Operating System,

Solaris 10 Operating System, OpenSolaris

Category: Data Loss, Availability

Release Phase: Workaround

Workaround Date: 27-Feb-2009

To view this Sun Alert document please go to the following URL:

http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-66-253628-1

Oh man! My nose is starting to bleed again.

Last Week my Brother was trying to recover files from a windows laptop that wouldn't boot. He suspected a virus.

I suggested using UBUNTU.

He asked if he was that nice gentleman from Nigeria that kept sending business opportunities by Email.

After a hearty laugh I told him about the Linux variant that was very popular for it's friendly GUI and live CD.

I downloaded and burned a CD and left it in his door.

When I checked back with him apparently i worked well.

Without any addition instruction from me, he was able to navigate Ubuntu find the files and transfer them to a USB disk.

Then he was able to get the laptop working again somewhat.

Good work Doug !

Category: Computers, Windows, Servers, HP


System: Compaq DL360 G1 (P21)


I am exploring methodologies for Installing Windows on servers using images.

I was struggling with an old Compaq DL360 Generation 1 machine we have several of.

I needed to upgrade disk firmware to get rid of an error due to mismatched firmware on the 2 SCSI hard disks connected to the internal Smart Array 5302 raid controller.

I know Hewlett Packard Provides upgrade CD's for these old systems but they have changed their website sometime breaking several old links in the process.

I finally found a link for the "Firmware Maintenance CD" which is provided for several models.

HP support had at one time sent me a link to version 7.50 which was supposed to support the DL360 G1 server but after downloading, burning, booting the CD you only get " Unsupported hardware"

According to the release notes DL360 G1 should be supported on 7.50 but is not!

Finally I found someone else who had the problem:

http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/linux/proliant/

After much rooting aroung on HP site So i downloaded version 7.40b of the CD and it worked fine. Thanks Andrew.

You can find older firmware maintenance CD links here. Make sure you scroll down and get the 7.40b version:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=254886&swItem=MTX-73e7147c53964e85850764aaf7&prodNameId=261261&swEnvOID=181&swLang=8&taskId=135&mode=5

( If HP dosen,t break it)

Here's what made me want to create a blog.
I was googling arount trying to find some simple info on extending heat duct work when finishing a basement.
What I wanted was to extend the original basement heat ducts which stop at the ceiling towards the floor.
I'm told this will help created a warmer finished basement.
I couldn't find anything very helpful.
So after scracthing my head I went to my local Home Depot and found a few pieces I could put together.
I put the results into a video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wrehS9bqvk&feature=channel_page
I still want to add a better before and after shot when I can.

Hello World.
This blog is a place I will share useful things I discover.
I am a computer IT professional. In addition to my family I enjoy home improvement and video editing.
These are things i plan to blog about when I find something useful.