Stephen Sekula drsekula@identi.ca

Dallas, United States

My current active account is over at steve@hub.polari.us - please interact with me there! I use this account for emergencies, like when the storms in Texas knock out power to the servers in my house...! (this happens a LOT).

  • 2016-11-11T03:12:29Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    For those of you who follow me at this backup account: my pump.io server, "The Hub", is down until I can get some replacement RAM into it on Saturday. The present RAM chip is literally, not figuratively, coughing up blood. Sure, the blood is some combination of corrupted 1s and 0s... but... you get the idea.

    I hope to have The Hub back online as soon as possible, assuming there was no data corruption on the disks due to the RAM failures.

    For a moment there, I thought your server was built like the Voyager, from ST:VOY, with bio-gelpacks xD

    JanKusanagi @identi.ca at 2016-11-11T09:26:12Z

    Stephen Sekula likes this.

  • The Hub is back... again again

    2015-07-08T05:20:06Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers

    OK, my friend and housesitter got the servers all back up at home so... switching back to my account on The Hub.

    jrobb likes this.

  • 2015-07-07T13:34:33Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers

    Time for a meeting. Then another meeting. It's a hot day, full of meetings.

  • 2015-07-07T12:29:16Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers

    The room is PACKED for the ATLAS Weekly meeting. Hot weather + basement seminar room = full house.

  • Downtime

    2015-07-07T09:01:01Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers

    I die a little more inside for every additional minute of personal server downtime... :-(

  • Detective work on my server...

    2015-07-07T07:26:16Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers

    I've been doing some detective work on my server. So, there was no bad weather in Dallas in the last 6 hours. Could be a problem with Time-Warner internet server. In fact, according to <https://downdetector.com/status/time-warner-cable >, TWC is having problems since 02:18 Eastern Time. Contacting TWC to see whether that includes my area.

  • And my server is down again

    2015-07-07T07:14:25Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers

    In the ongoing summer saga of server outages at my house... my server went down again 2 hours ago. I'll be tooling around on identi.ca today, picking up the shattered remains of my "following" list on this account... :-)

  • 2015-06-30T11:11:38Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers

    OK, server is back online thanks to @jodi@hub.polari.us! Switching back to my account on The Hub!

  • 2015-06-30T09:19:14Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers

    Building ATLAS Experiment analysis code on my laptop. Yay for portable physics analysis!

  • 2015-06-30T09:04:35Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers

    "Checking out the trunk and copying your files into it without merging is not a robust procedure." #SmackDownOfTheDay :-)

  • 2015-06-30T08:04:15Z via Dianara CC: Public

  • 2015-06-30T07:57:13Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers

    Power has been knocked out at my house again! Servers for hub.polari.us and cooleysekula.net and astrohep.org are offline. Moving to the backup identi.ca account until the power is back on and @jodi@hub.polari.us is awake, up and about, and able to power the servers back on...


    Incidentally, the outage was verified most easily not by checking with our power provider's online "outages" map, which is slow and painful and inaccurate, but by my Chevy Volt texting me to say "charging has been interrupted." I love that car.

  • 2014-06-26T05:01:26Z via Puma To: Public

    Well… I will be listening to THIS…

    https://librivox.org/the-atomic-bombings-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-by-us-army-corps-of-engineers/

  • 2014-06-22T16:37:16Z via Puma To: Public

    So the problem with my home server was not my server. This is the benefit of a friend with a key who can check the physical household. The problem is the Time Warner cable. It is not working at our house. I suspect that repairmen working on our house fixing hail damage physically disabled or disconnected the cable from the external input, probably by accident. We won't be able to restore internet access at the house until we return home.

  • 2014-06-22T15:01:18Z via Impeller To: JanKusanagi @identi.ca, Public, Stephen Sekula CC: Followers

    ... And by "genetic" I meant "generic".

    Ok, since Impeller posted this comment as a note, and therefore I see it in my timeline as a regular note, I'll reply here.


    I don't know of any manuals for watchdog timers, but it mainly consists of a chip in the motherboard that the OS, or a specific program needs to "ping" from time to time. If the watchdog chip doesn't get a "ping" in the expected amount of time, it powercycles the machine.


    I've worked with industrial-grade computers that had those, years ago. In that area they were common. I don't know how desktop computers are in that area nowadays. My guess is that it's still not very common, but maybe if the hardware was designed to be a server, it could have such a chip.


    AFAIK, that's what it's called, a watchdog, or watchdog timer.

    JanKusanagi @identi.ca at 2014-06-22T15:08:23Z

  • 2014-06-21T13:12:34Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    OK, fediverse brainstorm time. All input is welcome. I have a server at home. It occasionally (maybe once in 100 days) seizes, as servers often do. This always seems to happen when I am away from home. Here's what I need: ideas for how to _remote power-cycle the server_. (e.g. some way to remotely turn on and off the power to the server).

    Go.
    Show all 10 replies

    sweet! now you just have to get home to implement it :-)

    (or maybe your neighbor is awesome)

    jrobb at 2014-06-21T13:32:29Z

    That is sweet

    lostson at 2014-06-21T13:36:53Z

    Does the server hardware have some kind of watchdog functionality that could be enabled?

    JanKusanagi @identi.ca at 2014-06-21T13:50:52Z

  • 2014-06-21T02:29:29Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    I don't like it when my home server goes offline. Makes me antsy. You wouldn't like me when I'm antsy.
  • 2014-06-21T02:26:20Z via Identi.ca Web CC: Public

  • 2014-06-20T22:18:33Z via Puma To: Public

    Temporarily had to switch to my Identi.ca account. Pumpbuddy seems hosed and my home server is offline.

  • 2013-07-07T08:36:29+00:00 in Dallas, United States via WP-status-net To: Public

    Why I will no longer post on Google+ - http://is.gd/bNkeZw