- There were problems with the air conditioning in the computer room
in 525 Wilson over the weekend. Ciim and Dawn both hung in a heat-addled
state when the temperature hit 80 degrees. The problems began on Sunday
when the local weather was 105 degrees. Opened up the computer room and
placed fans to blow in cooler air from the hallway. Called Physical Plant
and their engineer came over. He said the computer room AC units were
functioning properly, but were not up to the task.
- M4.8 near Yorba Linda at 00:08 PDT on Tuesday. Traffic peaked at
464 hits/sec in Menlo Park, 331/sec in Pasadena, and 112/sec on the
Trinet server.
- Fixed a number of minor problems after the event. These included QDDS
not running properly on K2, some permission problems in the eqinthenews
directories on the Program servers, and a problem with a gif image for
the special report on the Trinet web server.
- Set up MRTG graphing of the computer room environment at
http://bort.gps.caltech.edu/mrtg-525-env/
- Monitoring the computer room temperature showed that the AC units were
in fact not cooling the room, even when the outside temperature was low.
Property management is calling a repair service to have a look at them.
- The licenses on the VMS systems expired again over the weekend. Got
new licenses from ITS and installed.
- Set up one of the new Dual-Athlon machines as node Scarp.
- Set up an account 'menlo' on the mailing list servers. Also set up
a test mailing list and list synchronization programs for Menlo Park to
use for testing. This is in preparation for them possibly offering a
public email notification service like the one we run in Pasadena.
- Assisted Kristine in Utah with trying to set up the 'utshake' account
to put Utah shakemaps on the Program web site.
- Upgraded Hotspot to Solaris 8 on Thursday.
- Installed phpmyadmin on Foreshock for Lisa to use for practice database
administration and php programming.
- Installed Forte 6 update 2 on Hotspot.
- Updated the Eqnews jar and conf files on Agent86 and Fang.
- Reston had a power outage on Sunday morning. Graben rebooted.
- M7.5 Papua New Guinea event on Sunday. Had to add the Eqnews item
to the Program web site.
- Set up a test web server on Sqehzmenlo for use by Bob Simpson.
- Ciim and Dawn both crashed with heat problems on Tuesday. The AC
in the computer room is still not working correctly.
- The contractor who installed the computer room air conditioners came
out on Thursday evening. He said that some sort of overload switch
had tripped during the Labor Day heat wave. He reset both units and
the began working somewhat better. The north unit is doing a 12 degree
drop and the south is doing 7.
- Found the name of Phillip Vaziri, who was the Caltech engineer who
helped us spec out the computer room AC system.
- Set up a system to be clone of Granite for upgrade purposes.
- Phillip Vaziri came out to inspect the computer room air conditioning.
He thinks that the system should be able to handle the present load, but
that the units are not functioning properly. This contradicts what
Property Management and Physical Plant are saying, but it agrees with
my calculations and the specifications on the Carrier web site.
- Set up a pair of mailing lists for Northern California earthquake
notifications. Made a sample subscription page and sent it to Scott
Haefner.
- Got the pinouts for the RJ-45 to DB-25 adapter we need for the paging
modem on Pacific.
- Did the Solaris upgrade on Rtdev on Wednesday. To reflect its current
status as part of the online system, rather than a development machine,
we changed its name to 'Gneiss'.
- Assembled Sandra's new printer.
- Helped Lisa with setting up Mysql on her laptop.
- Russell accidentally deleted some of the files from the SCIGN pages on
the Pasadena web site. Restored them from backup.
- Upgraded Solaris on Spring on Monday and changed its name to 'Atlantic'.
- Dawn crashed twice on Monday due to heat problems.
- Did some more testing of the computer room air conditioners and found
that they are able to maintain the temperature in the room, but only if
both units are running, and the ambient temperature outside is below
80 degrees. This seems to support my contention that the units are not
functioning properly.
- Rebuilt the 'top' program for the Solaris 8 machines.
- Got paging and QDDS running again on Atlantic on Tuesday.
- Reinstalled the FDDI drivers on Atlantic on Tuesday.
- Set up 'mimereject' on the eqinfo mail servers to block any message
with a Klez attachment.
- Built Big Brother for the Data Center RAID machines. At first, the
client didn't work. Fell back to 1.5d1 of Big Brother and it started
working. The only problem was that the 'touchtime' program didn't
compile. Replaced it with the working version from 1.9c and the whole
client worked.
- Made the adapter for Pacific's paging modem.
- Submitted the form to request a VPN account.
- Fixed a problem with the 'listsync' script for the Northern California
mailing lists. Also fixed a problem with the 'ml-sub-request' script.
- Utah was having problems with ssh to Horst for copying shakemaps.
They set up an account so I could try it out. It appears to be a
fundamental incompatibility between their commercial ssh version and
the OpenSSH on Horst. They are going to install OpenSSH for this
application to use.
***
- The air conditioning in the USGS computer room failed over Labor
Day weekend. The outside temperature was 105, and the computer room
overheated. Physical Plant says that the units are over capacity.
Phillip Vaziri from Caltech Engineering and Construction says that
they should be able to handle the load. Carrier claims that each
unit is capable of 22,600 BTU/hr, which works out to 6,400 watts.
The two should be able to handle about 13,000 watts, and the room
room's computers currently has only account for about 5,000 watts.
We are leaning on Property Management to resolve this issue.
- Set up mailing lists and a list manager account for Northern
California to do public earthquake notifications like we are currently
doing for Southern California. In the two years we have been running
this service, it has proven to be very popular, and the Southern
California mailing lists currently have over 6,000 subscribers.
- Did Solaris upgrades on two more of the real-time systems.