October solar

In October not only is the sun angle no longer great, but my neighbors huge tree shades my solar panels from about 3pm on so I'm not generating nearly as much energy.

700 kwh generated this month.

And i had to turn my heat on for a few days. Definitely going to have a couple of months of power bills to pay.

can't open boot_archive

Today I rebooted a server and switched disk0->disk1/disk1->disk0 for mirroring consistency.  I didn't
remember to edit vfstab first though, so I had to boot it to a milax live CD and edit the /etc/vfstab file.
Then rebooted.  Should be easy and smooth.

Unfortunately somewhere in there the boot_archive file got trashed, so then the system wouldn't boot at all.
So I brought it down to the boot prompt and ran

boot -F failsafe

to bring it up in failsafe mode.  At that point I should have been able to run

bootadm update-archive -R /a

(failsafe mounts the drive as /a) and it should have fixed the boot_archive and been able to boot
just fine.  However it kept mounting /a read only so the update didn't work correctly.  After a few
iterations of all that it finally worked.

Then it was back to trying to create the mirror.  There's some indication that the problem may have
been caused by creating the metadb before rebooting without finishing the mirror creation.

1 Year of Solar Electric Generation

Here are my first year totals. I sure hope I get to buy a good monitor soon. Ugh...I'm so tired of money problems.

Energy Supplied = 10.3 MWH
Yield = 477.2 USD
CO2 Reduction = 6.74 Tons
Maximum Output Power = 8097 W
Maximum Grid Voltage = 279 V
Minimum Grid Voltage = 209 V
Maximum Array Voltage = 422 V
Operating Hours = 4141 H

• Energy Supplied - Energy Supplied During Monitoring Period
• Yield - Money Earned During Monitored Period. (This is probably inaccurate.)
• CO2 Reduction - CO2 emissions avoided during monitored period if the same amount were generated by a combustion power plant
• Operating Hours - number of hours of power generation.

So in theory the power company will send me a check for $477 for the power I've generated this year.  In reality I didn't receive any money from them last year, but that may be because I generated less power than I used last year.  We'll see what happens in January.

According to the Operating Hours I got about 177 days of power generation out of the last 365.  Not bad given that the time doesn't accrue at night.

solaris syslog and logging from remote sources

I just spent two days trying to figure out why my new server wouldn't store external logs being sent to it like the old one did. I'd forgotten an entire step that is very imporant.
svccfg -s svc:/system/system-log setprop config/log_from_remote = true
This tells the system log to listen on port 514. I was seeing traffic to port 514 when I snooped, the syslog configuration looked right, but I wasn't getting anything stored. Very confusing. Luckily a lot of people have written about this so googling around for a bit showed me the answer relatively quickly.

For the rest of the syslog configuration in /etc/syslog.conf I added local4.none to the /var/adm/messages line to keep anything from the external log from going there. Same with operator and root and all the others. Then added:
local4.debug[tab]/log/file/location

It's very important to remember that all those lines should be tab separated, no spaces at all.