[ale] [OT] how do I monitor the "weather" in my computer room

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi all,

Hip Hip Hurray!

I finally got my remote "weather" monitoring system running.  It was NOT 
easy.  I spent all day (thus far) rewriting and editing scripts and, 
among other things, troubleshooting problems with commands that require 
sudo and funky web page formatting from netcat.  Thanks to all for the 
relevant and specific tips you provided.  I wouldn't have been able to 
do this without your help in any reasonable about of time.  I can now 
monitor the temperatures inside my downstairs computer from a web 
browser on my upstairs computer as long as they're on the same wifi 
router.  I can even monitor it from my tablet.  Very cool!

I have implemented a number of the tips you all gave me.  Many different 
script files are involved, which I hope to post before next week, so 
others can benefit from the information.  I have also been working on 
other technologies, including running spinrite to test a hard drive in a 
vm while I'm doing other things with the computer, which was not 
possible for me before.  I wrote another post about that.

You might find this interesting.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9879631/master-control.png

This is what I call my master control screen on a second monitor.  
That's where I keep track of a number of things I have going on in the pc.

Here's what each window does numbering from left to right:

Top Row:

window 1: monitors litecoin mining
window 2: monitors the cpu cores
window 3: spinrite running in a vm - YEA! (very slowly - BOO!)

Middle Row:

window 4: litecoin wallet
window 5: monitors local gpu 1 - mainly temperature
window 6: monitors local gpu 2 - mainly temperature
window 7: monitors local weather radar - so I can shut down if storms 
are coming

Bottom Row:

window 8: monitors litecoin pricing
window 9: monitors temperatures in the basement computer - YEA!

Reestablishing all these things when I reboot is a major pain, so I try 
not to do so too often.

I'm very pleased with the results today, although I had hoped it would 
go faster.  All the screens auto update.  For the ones that are browser 
based, I make extensive use of an auto update plugin for firefox and of 
the ability to scale the web page in firefox by hitting the ctrl- and 
ctrl+ keys.  I then size the window to fit the image.

Here's the plugin: http://reloadevery.mozdev.org/

There is one bug in my temperature monitoring system.  On any particular 
refresh of the web page for the Bugs01 machine, it displays the web page 
that was active at the time of the previous refresh.  I'm assuming that 
netcat precaches the file it will be transmitting when it starts and 
then waits for a request.  I'm not too worried about it since I have the 
web page refreshing every 1 minute.  On the server side, it generates a 
new temperature.html every 15 seconds.  So, the data I'm seeing on the 
screen could be up to 2 minutes out of date depending on the timing of 
the refresh cycle.  That's ok for my purposes.

A side effect of having this display is that I can tell if the Bugs01 
clock is wandering.  I haven't set ntp up on that one yet.

Again, thanks for all the help.

Sincerely,

Ron


-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new email messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier
770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT techstarship.com
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