Author: way0utwest

It must be picking up again, despite the lack of a sharp rise in energy prices, I am seeing more news about wind projects coming online. The latest one is a Rhode Island project from Deepwater Wind, to build an offshore wind farm.

I don’t think wind is the answer, but it’s a part of a way to generate power. We have lots of wind, it blows all night as well as during the day, and we should capture some of that. It’s good to see larger projects getting going around the country.

I’m not sure about offshore wind, but this will be interesting. We do make offshore drilling work, which I’m sure seemed like a silly idea at some point, so maybe this will work. There is a lot of knowledge about building structures to survive the incredible forces of the ocean, and I’m looking forward to seeing how feasible this is.

I have thought that small scale wind isn’t necessarily a good idea, though I’m testing some of that myself. I ordered a development kit of a Windbelt power generation kit and will set it up out at the Ranch with the idea of powering a small LED light, or set of lights.

My thought it to get this out near the gate where we can’t run power (too far), but could use lights for the gate or the keypad next to the gate. If there’s enough power, I might even try to light the street number. If it works OK, I might even look to modify it to have a capacitor or battery of some sort to sustain power on non-windy days.

I wrote an editorial last summer asking people what type of protection they had for their home setup. I got all kinds of answers, including a few I hadn’t thought of about online backup. Having a backup at home is good, but a fire could wipe out everything. It’s worth thinking about and while I use Live Mesh to keep things moving between machines, I also need to think about offsite backup.

However, in the meantime I decided to try Windows Home Server. I need to back up a bunch of machines, and this seems like one of the simplest ways to do it. The machines here at the house:

• dkranch10 – My main desktop
• tiny – My HP Netbook
• quasimodo – my Toshiba laptop
• my wife’s laptop
• The kids’ iMac
• my son’s laptop

In addition, it would be nice to move music among the machines as well as pictures. Right now we do a lot of CD burning or USB key shuffling when we want to do these things. A Windows Home Server will do all these things and handle the various platforms. I was getting tired of using External USB drives as well since I don’t think about moving things often enough.

I had checked on purchasing one at Amazon. A single disk HP Smart Server at $450 made some sense, but by the time I added in a few more drives, I’d be up in the $700 range. Not that it isn’t worth the cost to protect my data, but I get a free license to Home Server as an MVP, I have an old Dell Dimension E500 AMD64 that I replaced this year, and I have some technical knowledge.

After my laptop died recently and I shipped it away for repair, I got off my duff and ordered 2 new drives and a SATA card. When I’d added a new drive to me Dimension last year I had used the last SATA connection in the machine. My plan was to use the existing 2 drives and add 2 more with a new SATA card. From New Egg I got

• 2 2TB WD Green drives for $140 each
• 1 2 port SATA card for $20

They arrived a couple days ago, but I haven’t had a chance to get them into the machine. Finally today I opened it up and took a look. The first thing I noticed is that I only had space for 3 3.5” drives. That meant I’d need to pull one out. I checked and I had a 1TB and a 160GB drive. Guess which one went?

I also found out the SATA card was a half height card, built for “low profile” systems. I hadn’t noticed that, so I have a return to process. Then I noticed that both the CDRW and DVD drives were SATA. My plan was to disconnect one of the drives, the DVD only one, and use those connections for my other drives. I removed those, got my 3 drives into the computer, and closed things up. At this point I had 5TB in a system, which is easily the largest internal system I’ve worked on. We’ve had larger ones at work, but those were on a SAN. Shows you how long I’ve been out of the corporate technology world.

I booted up the system, checked the BIOS, and everything registered correctly. It’s amazing how much simpler this stuff has gotten over the years. No messing with inputting drive sizes, changing jumpers, etc. It just works.

I then rebooted, choosing the CD drive where my Windows Home Server was located. It booted, started setup, and asked for my product key. After that, it had detected my 3 drives, asked if I wanted them all to participate, and warned me all data was going bye-bye. I’m not 100% sure I have everything off them, but eff-it. I have backups across a few drives and at this point I need to move forward. If anything I lost some music, but nothing I can’t burn off a CD again.

From there it ran through setup, formatting drives and installing the OS. Once it was done with a lot of setup, about 30 minutes worth, it rebooted and I had a server on my network.

The cost for me to get a 5TB backup machine for me was about $320 since I reused existing hardware and the software didn’t cost me anything. It looks like you can buy the server software for around $100 from many places, so I would guess that if you have a fairly new spare computer you could set one up for about $400, a little time, a little elbow grease, and easily back up all your machines.

I note these for Database Weekly, but I haven’t blogged about them. A mistake on my part.

The December patches from Microsoft have come out. You can see the overview here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms09-dec.mspx They are Windows and Office related this month, no SQL Server ones, which is good. However there are some rated critical. While I wouldn’t install them today, I’d start testing and pay attention to the bulletins, especially if there is a chance for an issue with your systems.

We’ve had the ASK SQLServerCentral site up for a couple months now and while I see traffic continuing over there, it seems that most of our questions and answers are still taking place on the traditional forums. That’s good since I prefer our forums, though I do try to get over to ASK at least a couple times a day and actually ask or answer a question.
It’s slightly messed up my goals for the year since I had made it a goal to post 400 times a month in our forums, however when the ASK site came up, the new format changed the way that I worked with users. In our traditional forums, often an answer requires a discussion, we might ask for more information, we might need to clarify or respond to the posters understanding of our answer, or something else. That means that a traditional “discussion” of an issue typically winds up with 2-3 posts from an person answering going back and forth with the poster.
In the ASK site, we are supposed to edit the question, and if we need more information, post a comment, which isn’t necessarily a part of the question or answer. So that as I try to answer something, I don’t really get a post.
The other thing that I often do in traditional forums when I’m trying to help a user gain confidence, I’ll second an answer given by someone else. I know when two people give me the same answer, or one seconds another’s answer. I have confidence in it. On the ASK site I can vote up an answer, but I can’t add my personal recommendation.
Maybe that doesn’t matter, but it certainly has messed up my goals. After the Thanksgiving break and time spent on the ASK site, I came back last week to just over 200 posts in the last 30 days. I’ve been working to get that back to 300, but it’s been hard, especially as many posts I’ve examined have had good answers on them already.
I’m not sure how I’ll look at this moving forward for next year, but it’s about time to re-examine my goals and start to create some for next year.