hopefully some useful information, hacks, and solutions
Just sent out an email to the interest parties in getting trees to get some forms back for the planting by the 15th of March.
Here is the FUF page with links to the forms we need.
http://www.fuf.net/treePlanting/plantingForms.html
You can fax them directly to FUF or drop them by my house.
Woo-hoo! We have a date with Friends of the Urban Forest to work towards now. This will mean we will have to have everyone’s forms in by March 15th, but we should be able to do that!
Congrads to everyone out there in the ‘hood for stepping up. I will probably want to sit in front of Tower Market to see if I can get anyone else prior to moving ahead. I am very excited and ready to plant for the neighborhood.
It is great to see some improvements happening on Mt. Davidson. The cross is really a great structure and the views from Mt. Davidson on a clear day are awesome. Since there are not a lot of pics on the net on Mt. Davidson, here are a few we took last week. They are working on the path and stairs up from the lower part of the park to the main walk to the Mt. Davidson Cross.
Top view of the Altus 1600 server with top panel removed
Don’t know how many of them are still out there, but my school had a couple of Penguin Computing Altus 1600 SS 1U servers when I arrived. One was offline and the other was being used as a sendmail/dovecot email system. They might have come shipped with Fedora back in the day. I setup the offline line one with RAID1 and put CentOS 5.4 on it. It is doing some DNS and Apache serving for us.
It was still barely on the support contract at the time with Penguin Computing so I was able to get some semi-recent BIOS and controller updates (July 2008). Since that time, have really been on my own. The server is older and I can’t blame them for not doing anything further with it. It has been running great actually and there has only been one annoyance. The flashing red warning light on the front of the chassis. The light has been blinking for at least a year.
After multiple resets and looks into the IPMI logs in BIOS, there were always intrusion detection errors. I would clear them and not open the chassis, but still get the errors in the BIOS. I guessed the red flashing had to be related to that and if I could disable the intrusion detection sensor, my annoying red light would cease. When I was moving the server room rack locations, I decided to solve this once and for all.
Sliding the top cover back and off, you will see an intrusion switch/sensor towards the rear near the power supply. Here are a couple of shots of it. I did this ‘hot’ (i.e. while the server was running) but don’t do that.
Side view of intrusion detection switch/sensor on the Altus 1600
Another side view of intrusion sensor on the Altus 1600
You can wiggle the body of that senor free and disconnect the wires that lead to the jumpers on the motherboard. This will nix the sensor feeding a bad result to the BIOS. If you have the server on when you do this (not recommended!) you will see the front bezel red warning light stop.
The pulled intrusion detection sensor from the Altus 1600
With the faulty sensor yanked, and the warning light dark, it was time to move on to better things.
Flashing red light no more!
In my recruitment of property owners in the Miraloma Park and Sunnyside areas of San Francisco, I have received many responses from people that were interested but concerned about the limited sidewalk width issues that the city mandates perhaps for ADA considerations.
I brought this up with FUF and they came back with this;
“I’ve gotten more details about the narrow sidewalks in Miraloma Park that makes it a difficult neighborhood to plant. Basically, it just requires a little bit of creativity and each basin that we cut out and place a tree into needs to have at a certain amount of substance put back into the basin on the outer edges. We can apparently acquire the material that needs to be put back in cheaply, and it isn’t a big expense, although it might add a few bucks per person. Then we need to tell our counterparts at the city’s Bureau of Urban Forestry that that’s what we are doing. Those details are all what our arborists work out, and I think the best thing to do would be to talk to one of our arborists to get a better sense of what to tell folks to expect, so they know its not completely straightforward.”
So, please hang in there and we will make this happen.