• Power down the VM
• Go to another windows VM and add a hard disk
• Select “use an existing disk” and browse the data store for the VMDK you want to fix.
• Use the normal windows storage management tools to expand the filesystem.
• Remove the disk from the second VM.
• Power up your modified VM and Bob’s your Uncle.

Devotion To Duty

 http://xkcd.com/705/

This bike looks pretty complete and the numbers match.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260555028199

Update: bidding closed at US $26,900.00

Jings!

It has been noted that Lucas components are possibly more prone to electrical leakage than Bosch or generic Japanese electrics. Experts point out that this is because Lucas is British and all things British leak. British engines leak oil, shock absorbers, hydraulic forks and disk brakes leak fluid, British tyres leak air and the British defense establishment leaks secrets…so, naturally, British electrics leak smoke.

(anonymous)

Engine numbers, frame numbers, model designations and engine configuration for Ariel motorcycles from 1926 – 1965.

Two strokes are at the bottom.

Note- 1941-5, 350 W/NG. Some of the machines made for the Royal Navy had engine prefix letters NBH, and some of the machines made for the Royal Air force had engine prefix letters RBH. There was no record of this in the Despatch Books. In both cases the numbers were in the main BH sequence.

Ariel Two Stroke engine and frame prefix and suffix letters.

Note:- the two strokes all left the factory with the engine number the same as the frame number. One series of numbers was used for all the two strokes, prefixed T-,the model being indicated by the suffix letter.

/A = Early Leader
/B = Late Leader
/S = Early Arrow
/T = Late Arrow
/G = Arrow SS
/H = 200cc Arrow

Early Leaders and Arrows ( /A and /S ) are those up to and including 17440.
Late Leaders and Arrows ( /B and /T ) are those17441 and higher.
The earliest Arrow T- 8701/S
The earliest Arrow SS T- 20384/G
The earliest Arrow 200cc T-33701/H

This list originaly compiled by Roger Gwynn and Ralph Hawkins in September 1989, corrections to February 1993.

Merged in model letters and bore/stroke info from Accessory Mart.

All reproduced with permission.

Ariel tended to mix things around a bit so the line from one year to the next is not clean. For definitive dating of your machine contact the AOMCC or Draganfly. For a small fee they can look up their microfiche copy of the factory despatch books. Each bike received a handwritten entry with other info included such as special options and date of despatch and where to. That’s how I know my bike’s birthday is May 31st!

Virtuozzo makes status information in /proc/user_beancounters. The different fields are pretty cryptic – their meanings are described in detail here.

The attached zip file contains two cacti template exported from Cacti version Version 0.8.7b, a snippet to add to the snmpd.conf on the server and a one line shell script called readbeans which is called by the snmpd agent. Deploy these latter items on your GoDaddy VM and suck the templates into Cacti. This will give you a “Virtuozzo Beancounters” data query which you can add to your device which should give you access to 20 graphs (don’t check resource, that one is bogus).

I found that building a compound graph like this brought together the most interesting values:

This long term graph shows where I implemented the crude but effective solution of restarting various system processes nightly (snmpd, httpd, mysqld, named and Plesk), some of which were gradual memory hogs.

Download this template

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLAVx19vOZw

Gazing at sysstat is sound advice, but sounds like a job for a robot or a computer to me. Make the machines do the work is one of my maxims.

So I conjured up this cacti graph in class which will watch consistency point activity all the time. So far this has caught some very interesting middle-of-the-night activity, some of which coincided with application performance problems.

This sample graph shows the normal green of timer CPs from a relatively idle system, with periodic blue spikes triggered by the automatic hourly snapshot activity. The big flesh colored blob in the middle is a large copy operation that occurs as part of a legacy database backup process that we have not yet re-engineered to take advantage of snapshots. The right hand end of the graph shows what happens when doing a large myISAM to InnoDB database conversion – more on this when that project is completed. I’ve deliberately made the back-to-back and deferred-back-to-back CPs red as they are evil. The only time I have seen these is when a RAID group was reconstructing after the NetApp pulled a disk out for testing – performance really sucked that day for our gigantic myISAM tables. Most of our normal high activity periods are characterized by High Water CPs, though I have also seen occasional pink tinges of Log Full.

Here are what the different CP types mean, along with the corresponding letter prefix you will observe in sysstat and SNMP MIB name:

• Back to Back (B – cpFromCpOps) If you are getting these, your filer is overloaded. The write traffic is coming in faster than it can be written and the filer is running out of NVRAM capacity in one bank before the data in the other bank can be written. We got some of these during a RAID reconstruct. Bad news.
• Deferred Back to Back (b – cpFromCpDeferredOps).  these are a worse version of the above. Definitely an overload problem.
• Timer (T – cpFromTimerOps) 10 seconds since the last CP – it means the system is pretty idle write-wise. Note that lightly writing to a NetApp may lead to more fragmentation than writing a bit more at a time, as it does not get the opportunity to stack stripes. Exercise is good.
• Flush (U – cpFromFlushOps) a flush happened. I’m sure it cleared something away.
• High Water (H – cpFromHighWaterOps) the number of RAM buffers holding modified data exceeded a threshold. Heavy write activity.
• Log Full  (F – cpFromLogFullOps) the current NVRAM bank is full and the system switches to the other one and starts writing this to disk. Very heavy write activity.
• Low Water (L – cpFromLowWaterOps) the number of available RAM buffers dropped below a threshold.
• Low Datavec (D – cpFromLowDatavecsOps) the number of available datavecs (data vectors?) dropped below a threshold.
• Low Vbuf (V – cpFromLowVbufOps) the number of available virtual buffers dropped below a threshold.
• Snapshot (S – cpFromSnapshotOps) snapshots happen. It is a NetApp. Usually triggers a bunch of Sync (Z) CPs.
• Sync (Z – cpFromSyncOps) an internal sync – usually preparing to complete a snapshot.

This template was exported from Cacti Version 0.8.7e

Dowload it here.

So here’s the math, with some minor rounding to keep the sums simple.

The sun radiates an effectively unlimited amount of energy. It spreads it out in all directions and it is very far away. By the time the sunlight gets to the surface of the Earth, on a sunny day, at noon, at the equator, there is about 1000 Watts per square meter available for us to convert to useful power.

On a typical car, once you eliminate the windows, which you need to see through, there is maybe two square meters of surface looking up at the sky where you can stick solar panels, so there is a maximum of 2000 Watts to be had.

The best commercially available solar panels, in ideal conditions, can convert a maximum of 20% of the sunlight to electricity, but affordable ones get less. These ones are typical, and give about 100 Watts per square meter, or 200 Watts for our available area.

Ideal conditions means being at the equator, at noon, no clouds and the panels at right angles to the sun. We aren’t at the equator, it usually isn’t noon, clouds happen, the panels are at whatever angle the car happens to be pointing, and the sun moves across the sky anyway. Let’s generously say that all these non-ideal factors cut us down to 100 Watts.

The average electric car conversion uses 200 Watt-Hours per mile. If we assume that this is bimbling along at a useful 30 miles per hour, the car would be consuming 30 x 200 = 6000 Watts. The solar panels can only provide 100/6000 = 1/60th of the power we need to push the car along a suburban street. So they are pretty useless for powering the car in real-time. That is not to say that if you built a specially light car, with low friction and drag, and spread it out so it had lots of area for solar panels and then drove it somewhere really sunny, it wouldn’t work. In fact they race cars like this in Australia. It just isn’t something you are going to get registered at the DMV and run down to the shops in.

So what about using solar panels on the car to charge the batteries? That can be done, but is pretty ineffective. If we park it at work and let it charge for 8 hours at 100 Watts we can put about 800 Watt-Hours into the battery – which adds a whopping 4 miles (at 200 Watt-Hours to the mile) to the range of the car. Every little helps – you might think.

But this only takes into account the electrical characteristics. Solar panels have a physical aspect too. They are big, heavy and flat. The weight of our example panels is about 100lbs, plus mounting bracketry and extra electronics. The electric car conversion is already wallowing under the weight of the batteries – so we’d need to lose about two Trojan T105 batteries to make way for them. Even allowing for a 50% maximum discharge, these batteries represent 1350 Watt-hours of stored energy – nearly 7 miles of range. So if we kept the batteries and charged them before we left home, our overall range would be 3 miles longer than if we replace them with panels. Yes, the power is free, saving about 10 cents a day (assuming off-peak overnight charging with the new smart meters).

The other physical aspect to consider is that solar panels are big flat things. Little round cars (we are looking at the VW Beetle remember) don’t have lots of flat surfaces to let big flat things blend in, so our streamling will be kaput. This means it will take more then 200 Watt-hours per mile to push the car down the road. It won’t take much additional drag to have the car use more energy pushing the panels through the air on the way to and from work than they can generate all day long, at which point you need to buy more power from the power company than you did before.

Even if you could save that 10 cents a day, those two square meters of panels are priced at $1420. It would take about 39 years for them to pay for themselves.

So when they come up with cheap, flexible (paint-on?) solar panels, it would’t hurt to add them, but in the mean time the funds are better invested in things like regenerative braking or a smart charging sytem that lengthens battery life. Solar panels on the roof of the house, which has enough surface area to make in impact and offsets peak usage in the household (we were dinged up to 44c/Kwh last summer) makes sense – sticking them on a little electric car does not.

The primary components are:

• Donor vehicle (engine optional)
• Electric motor
• Controller for the electric motor
• Adapter plate to mount the electric motor
• Coupler to connect the motor to the transmission
• Batteries
• Charger for the batteries
• Mountings for the batteries
• Miscellaneous potboxes, shunts, contactors, wiring and connectors.

Step one is to decide on the application of the vehicle – what will it be used for? EV conversions, at least the affordable kind we are thinking on, are limited in speed and range. We live in a fairly small California town without much in the way of gradients, so an EV with the ability to make two across town round trips a day would make it an adequate runabout for the elder teenager who just hit driving permit age.  That is 25 miles on the flat with a max speed limit of 45 mph and mostly only 30 mph. Not unreasonable, and eliminates possible teenage drag-racing tendencies.

What vehicle to use?

A 1971 to 1974 Volkswagen  Super Beetle.

Why?

• Beetle conversions are common – full conversion kits are available.
• Beetles are common – the largest production run of any car, over 22 million from 1937 – 2003. While in some parts of the world they have largely rusted away, here in California they putter on forever.
• Huge parts availability.
• Easy to work on – the whole body comes off the frame with about 20 bolts.
• Lightweight.
• No power steering – without a constant running engine in an EV there is nothing to drive the pump.
• No power brakes – without the Infernal Combustion Engine intake there is nothing on an EV to generate the vacuum.
• Affordable. There are always several runners available on the local Craigslist for under $2000. They are not old enough or rare enough to be collectible.
• Big parcel shelf behind the rear seat to put batteries in.
• Super Beetle (1971 on) has lots of room in the front for more batteries.
• Super Beetle has strut suspension that should be easier to beef up to support the battery weight than the torsion bar suspension on the standard Beetle.
• Pre-75 Beetles are exempt from smog, making the paperwork simpler at the DMV.
• They are CUTE!

There are some drawbacks though:

• Drum brakes. Upgradeable to disks, and there are kits to provide vacuum boost electrically. With the extra weight of the batteries this is a big concern.
• No airbags, crumple zones or any modern safety gear beyond seat-belts. Hopefully mitigated by limited speed.
• At 26-29 years old there will be wear, tear, rust and fatigue to deal with.