The CANable open-hardware USB to CAN adapter is now back in stock! You can order directly from the Protofusion Tindie store. I dropped the price to $25, making the CANable an even more affordable way to interface with the CANbus. Check out canable.io for more information.

With the advent of powerline LAN from various manufacturers for a steadily decreasing price, designing network-connected products becomes much easier. Once the price of hardware for powerline networking drops due to wide acceptance, some standard “dumb” appliances and pieces of hardware could be easily and cheaply networked, allowing for a “home automation” of sorts, such as lightswitches and power outlets.

We already have twittering “tweet-a-watts,” but powerline networking could extend this functionality and add control to every switch and outlet in one’s house. Just think–a house having all of its outlets and switches networked would be fully customizable, controllable, and monitorable. A homeowner could see power usage on a per-outlet (or even per-plug!) basis, which could make saving electricity much easier. In addition, power outlets and switches could be actively controlled over the network, allowing a computer to regulate power savings by, let’s say turning off or dimming a light, completely autonomously.

Despite many utility providers beginning to deploy “smart meters” (meters that let report, and often let you see, your power usage), monitoring power on a per-outlet basis still has great advantages. The “smart meter” can only report the energy usage of an entire household, and homeowners must unplug devices and check their energy usage monitor to determine how much power a device is using. With networked outlets and switches, users could see power usage on a per-outlet basis on a single screen, live. Networked outlets and switches could provide crucial energy-saving information to homeowners, saving them money and saving the earth from pollution.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kk/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

First off, install your DRAC card in the server, before going any further. Hook up a cat3/5/6/7 up to it for good measure as well, and get it on your network. Done? Good. Now comes the fun part.

Boot up your system, then hop over to this page on Dell’s site to download the drivers and utilities for your DRAC II card. Unzip the file somewhere on your filesystem, and cd into the rpm directory. You should see 4 RPM files. You need to install the rpm corresponding to the kernel you use (most users will want the “UP” rpm, for standard kernel, EP is Enterprise Kernel, SMP is the SMP kernel).

To make this process a bit less painful (maybe), use yum localinstall <DRAC-RH70-XX-2.3.2-X.X.rpm to install the driver package you need. (Note: don’t install the “Common” RPM yet)

Now, type yum localinstall DRAC-RH70-Common-2.3.2-2.i386.rpm to install the utilities package.

As of this point, both of these commands will probably fail miserably on a more modern system (e.g., CentOS 5) due to missing dependencies. Fixing this is extremely hard, because the software wants ucd-snmp, which has been renamed to net-snmp as of late. “module-info” is also reported unresolvable and should be present on the system. Any ideas on how to fix these? Check out the comments. I will post a workaround once I learn of one.

Until then…

Classify the problem: Are your fans loud or do they make scraping noises?

Scraping Noises

Scraping noises are often caused by bad bearings, whether it be an oil-sleeve bearing or a ball bearing. Take the label off of your fan, if you see a bearing surrounding the shaft, then you do NOT have an oil-sleeve bearing.

Oil sleeve bearings: Place one drop of light oil (sewing machine oil works quite well) on the spindle, replace the label, and let the fan run for a few minutes. Do not over-oil. If the fan is still noisy, remove the clip from the end of the shaft (if present) and detach the fan blades from the coil/case assembly. Ensure that the spindle and sleeve are clean, then re-assemble and oil.

Ball bearings: Place 1-2 drops of oil on the bearing(s). This may have limited success. If it fails, you can try flushing the bearings with oil, drying with paper towel, then putting on a single drop of oil.

Loud

Have loud fans? Chances are you need to just replace them or throttle them.

Throttling: Check out your bios for settings related to “Quiet n Cool” (for AMD CPU fan throttling) and PWM settings for other 3-pin fans on your system. Don’t have the options or 3-pin fans? Throttling can be done manually with rheostats and resistors, just make sure you don’t over heat your system.

Replacement: Check out eBay or your local junk drawer for any fans that may work as decent replacements. Feel free to use overly large fans on small heatsinks, such as northbridges; if positioned correctly, these may render decent results. Warning: Don’t try this with graphics card heatsinks, as they get much hotter than the average northbridge under load. For case fans, try and get larger (120mm) fans if your case accommodates them. Larger == less rpm == less noise + good airflow.

Any questions, comments, or criticism? Feel free to leave some comments.