Widodh

I’ve wrote a letter to Tesla, wrote a blogpost about it and discussed it on the Tesla Motors Club forum and it seems it has paid off!

Tesla Motors just announced that the Model S will support 3-phase charging in Europe!

On Twitter they tweeted:

Tesla’s Model S in Europe will be capable of three phase charging.

That is great news for all future Model S owners in Europe!

Now it’s back again to waiting for the Model S to be parked at my house.

The biggest issue with Electric Vehicles (EV’s) is charging. How do I charge my car within a reasonable time frame? Charging within 1 hour is possible, but you need a lot of power to do so. That is not available on all locations and requires special chargers.

Almost two years ago I made a reservation for a Tesla Model S, the car which I think is the best EV to come to the market.

In the summer of 2011 I was invited to a ‘reservation holder only event‘ at the Tesla factory in Fremont California. I went there and saw the Model S for the first time: Wow…. I was blown away, what a beauty.

EV’s however are new and not everything is technically the way you want it to be.

What is 3-phase charging and why would you want it?

Timely charging is the biggest issue with EV’s. With 3-phase charging you could charge your EV 3 times faster, since Europe has a 3-phase power grid.

I live in Europe (The Netherlands) and  unlike the USA were are limited to ~32A per phase. In the USA you can get a 100 Amp installation in your house. Amps and Volts is all that counts when you want to charge an EV.

With a 100 Amp connection in the USA, you get 20kW of power. (100A * 208V =~ 20kW). The biggest battery of a Model S is 85kWh (Kilowatt hour). 85 kWh / 20kW = 4.25 hour of charging (not taking any losses into account).

Like mentioned, in Europe we have a 3-phase power grid and we are limited to 32A per phase in residential areas (Rules are complex!). 32A at 230V = 7.3kW.

The 85kWh battery of a Model S would take almost 12 hours (85 / 7.3) to charge.

Here comes the 3-phase power into play. We can get 3 times 32A in our hose at 400 Volts. (See the Wikipedia page). This calculation is a bit more complex: 400 * 32 * SQ(3) =~ 20kW. We also get 20kW of power in our residential areas, but it’s delivered to us spread out over 3-phases instead of one.

The bottom-line is: Without 3-phase charging it will take three times longer to charge a Model S in Europe then in the USA. That’s why I want 3-phase charging for the Model S.

When I made my reservation the Tesla website stated that the Model S could charge from 110V, 220V and 480V. From that moment I assumed the Model S would support 3-phase charging, but then I went to the event at the factory in Fremont.

 

 

This picture shows the new charging connector of the Model S. Tesla designed a new connector which could handle AC (low to medium (20kW)) power and DC (high >50kW)) power over the same pin layout. This results in a very sleek connector. A great connector if you look at it from a designers perspective.

The connector is however lacking a 2nd and 3rd connector for 3-phase charging. This connector design only has:

• A ground (bottom middle)
• A proximity and pilot connection (bottom left and right)
• A Phase connection (top left or right)
• A neutral connection (top left or right)

In order to support 3-phase power the connector should have two more ‘big’ connectors.

I asked a Tesla employee if the Model S could charge from 3-phases and he said “No, it won’t” I felt really disappointed. I had been waiting on the Model S for such a long time already (18 months), living with the assumption (since the website stated 480V charging) that it would support 3-phase charging.

 

 

The employee told me that Tesla focused on Quick/Fast/Super-charging a Model S with high power DC (500V, ~200A, 90kW, 45 min) instead of the slower charging. The Model S would also be able to travel such long distances that you could do almost all your driving without charging. I argued he was wrong, but it was quite busy at the event, so I didn’t get into a in-depth discussion with him.

Although the event at the Tesla factory was great, the news about the lack of 3-phase charging gave a real bad taste.

In the car back to the hotel I started brainstorming with my colleague (the Roadster owner) about how we could convince Tesla otherwise. As a Roadster owner in Europe he’s also quite disappointed about the Roadsters limitation to 7kW (32A @ 230V) charging (8 hours) in Europe. He however accepted it since the Roadster is a car for pioneers, early adopters or tech freaks, however you want to call them.

If you by a base Model S you get one on-board 10kW AC charger, but if you pay $1500,00 you get a second 10kW charger which runs parallel with the first charger, giving you 20kW AC charging.

Wait a minute? 20kW AC charging? That is exactly what we want in Europe! In the US the chargers run parallel on 1-phase, as Europeans we want the 20kW spread out over 3-phases. So what is the point? Tesla clearly sees that 20kW AC charging is useful in the US, why not in Europe?

To get back to the brainstorming: We came up with the idea to write a letter to Tesla and start collection signatures from people who agreed with me. So I did, I wrote a letter to Tesla together with 39 hand written signatures.

On the right two pictures of how this looked.

On November 4th 2011 I sent this package to the Tesla HQ in Palo Alto, CA, USA and I started waiting…

 

After a month of waiting for just a “Thank you for your letter” I also sent the letter to the Tesla EU HQ in London and posted a Tweet. That is when I got a “Thank you” from Tesla, but nothing conclusive. I never expected Tesla to reply within a month with a answer that they would or wouldn’t support 3-phase charging.

I completely understand that such decisions might have a big impact and involve a lot of people, so these kind of things take time.

However, is implementing 3-phase support that hard? I think it’s not. The biggest obstacle I think is the connector (see above) that Tesla designed. It’s missing the necessary connections for L2 (2nd phase) and L3 (3rd phase), so they would have to redesign that connector. They could also add a second charging port on the car and support the IEC 62192-2-2 connector natively without any adapters?

 

3-phase charging would drastically improve the usage of the Model S. On a 3x16A (10kW) connection you could charge a Model S with it’s 85kWh battery in about 8 hours. A Nissan Leaf also charges in 8 hours, but a full charge of a Leaf gets you 160km, a full Model S takes you up to 480km.

A 3x32A connection (20kW) could charge a Model S in a bit over 4 hours.

I made a graph to display the various charging times for a Model S and a Roadster. You get the picture why 3-phase charging is really needed for the Model S!

 

Without 3-phase charging you wouldn’t even be able to charge your Model S overnight! How are you supposed to charge the Model S if you get back home later in the evening and want to leave the next morning? A full charge could take over 24 hours!

Most (bigger) hotels in Europe also have a 3-phase connection available somewhere in the parking lot, if not, it is trivial to get such a connection installed. With just a single-phase socket you can’t charge your Model S overnight (see the chart above).

That is why I emphasized this to Tesla: “European’s don’t want 3-phase charging, they need 3-phase charging!”

The faster you can charge your EV, the better. It makes the car more practical, simple as that.

The final decision is at Tesla, but I think that supporting 3-phase charging is trivial and vital for Tesla if they want to be successful in Europe. In my letter to Tesla I showed them how many 3-phase charging stations are available in Europe. The current estimate is that over 2.500 (~1300 in Holland alone!) of these charging stations are installed in Northern Europe and they are being installed on a daily basis. (Amsterdam is installing at least one every week).

We just saw the release of the Pricing & Options of the US Model S, so I’m not expecting a answer from Tesla really soon. I however have good hope that Tesla will implement 3-phase charging for the Model S. My hope is that they will reveal it at the Geneva Motor Show in March 2012.

 

 

Something else which has been bothering me is the DC (fast-charging) charging Tesla will be using for the Model S. They say it will be DC charging at 500V and can top up your Model S in 45 minutes. They call it “Supercharging”.

Around the world (especially in Europe and Japan) fast-chargers are being installed which are compliant to the CHAdeMO protocol.

CHAdeMO is a fast-charge protocol which delivers up to 50kW of power. If we take a look again at the calculations above: 85kWh / 50kW = 1.7 hours for a full charge.

The Nissan Leaf is one of the first cars to support CHAdeMO fast-charging. A CHAdeMO station can recharge the 24kWh battery of a Leaf in 30 minutes.

Yes, the 50kW a CHAdeMO charger delivers is 60% of the 90kW Tesla is intending to use, but still, 50kW is better then nothing.

Tesla claims that they will be installing their “Super chargers” throughout the US and even Europe, concrete plans are however lacking.

The CHAdeMO chargers are being rolled out today. Nissan recently said that they will donate 400 chargers in Europe. 400 chargers!? That is great! If the Model S could take advantage of these chargers you could travel even further.

CHAdeMO seems to be winning in Europe and Japan as it comes to fast-charging. I’m not sure about the US, but it seems it’s getting traction there as well. In 2012 there will be hundreds or more then a thousand of these chargers throughout Europe. It would be a shame if the Model S can’t charge there.

BP (British Petroleum) has started installing CHAdeMO chargers at their stations along highways in the Netherlands, but incentives like those are being initiated all over Europe. In 2011 the Norwegian energy company Ishasvkraft announced that they will be installing CHAdeMO chargers throughout Norway. Lysi Energy is doing the same in Norway.

On the Tesla Motors Club forum I recently started a thread on CHAdeMO charging for the Model S. We can be almost a 100% sure that the Model S won’t natively support CHAdeMO charging, but there is always the possibility of an adapter. Tesla did not reveal any plans for such an adapter, but there is hope.

 

My message to Tesla is that they should make the Model S the best EV on the planet and crush all competition. I’m blown away by the Model S and can’t wait to receive mine. It would however be a shame if the car would be limiting me by not letting me take advantage of the available power provided by 3-phase and CHAdeMO charging stations.

The specifications of the Model S are great, no doubt about that. Just make sure that I as a driver can take full advantage of all the charging possibilities which are available. That would make me (and I think a lot with me) a very, very, very happy customer!

 

 

A few friends of mine run a Magento webshop (1.3) and they had the problem that customers would be redirected back to the shopping cart after filling in their personal information.

I tried the same, but my order would go through. I was kind of lost, why did it always work for me but it wouldn’t for other customers?

After some hours of searching I tried to enter my Gmail address instead of my personal address and that failed. I got redirected back as well.

A report showed up in var/report with a warning from the Zend Framework core saying that the gmail address could not be validated.

Some Googling brought me to the magento forums.

The bug is indeed in lib/Zend/Validate/Hostname.php on line 329

Replace:

if (Zend_Loader::isReadable($classFile)) { 

With:

if (file_exists($classFile) && Zend_Loader::isReadable($classFile)) { 

And you should be up and running again!

I haven’t debugged this further to find out what the root cause is, but I’d thought I’d share my solution.

Somewhere in August I got a invitation of Tesla to come over to the factory in Fremont California and see the Model S in person.

As a reservation holder of a Model S I simply could not refuse that invitation! Lucky me I still had some business to do in California and I had a paintball tournament there, a bit of travelling through the USA and I could attend the event, yay!

I did not know what to expect, but I expected something big. Tesla is not investing in any form of promotion of their Model S, but they seem to solely rely on the product promoting itself and using modern techniques like Facebook and Twitter. I saw myself as a ‘messiah’ (Ok, that is dramatized!) for Tesla, they would rely on us to overload the world with Tweets and messages with Facebook. Tempting and convincing other people to also make a reservation for the Model S.

My colleague (The Roadster owner) and I stayed in San Francisco to check out the area but also to be close to Fremont!

Driving towards the factory we did not know what to expect. How big is the factory? How many Model S’es will there be? How long wil the test drive be? (I knew that I would not be driving myself).

Arriving at the factory is impressive, it’s HUGE! The first thing you see is the big T-E-S-L-A sign on the outer wall.

We parked the car and walked to the entry, have to say, that was the longest walk ever over a parking lot!

Once inside the first thing we saw was a clay model of the Model S, one half brown, the other one silver.

Seeing that model shows you how big the S is. At first Tesla said it would be the size of a BMW 5-series, well, it’s more like a 7-series!

Further down in the factory there was the ‘exploded body’ of the Model S and a chassis with battery and drive-train in it. This gave a good impression of the storage capacity the S has, but also how small the drivetrain actually is. I’ve seen it on multiple pictures, but seeing in for real is something different. A real piece of modern engineering!

Standing at the chassis I turned around and saw the final assembly, a smooth white factory hall with all these red machines, really in Tesla style!

From there one we walked over to the tour check-in, here we got a 90 minute tour around the still work in progress factory. Stamping, painting, plastic moulding and more, really cool to see the birth place of your future piece of modern engineering!

I was so impressed that I sometimes forgot to take pictures! But there are many pictures of this great event floating around on the internet, for example the Picasa album of Ben Goodwin.

Being done with the factory tour it was time for the speech of Elon Musk! He came driving on stage in the red Model S with a total of 8 persons + luggage in it! Have to say, one person was hidden in the “frunk” and in the back jumpseats were two kids!

Elon seemed to be a bit overwhelmed about the presence of so much (about 2.000) future Model S owners. He gave a quick demonstration of the Model S and gave a short talk, which both seemed to be completely improvised and not studied. I liked that, no standard talk, but something that came to mind the moment he was on stage! He even forgot the announcement of the Model S sport! George Blankenship had to call everybody back to get the announcement out. 4.5 sec from 0 – 96 km/h, wauw!

After Elon’s talk it was time to head outside to the area where the rides were being given. We had a slot between 22:00 and 22:30, but it was barely 21:00 at that time, so we had some time to grab a bit, drink a beer and just watch the three S’es driving around. I preferred the white one and that was exactly the on I got my ride in!

Two beers and some chats later it was time for our test drive! I called shotgun on the front seat, but one of the two persons in front of me was Elon’s son, so no need for that. But another car pulled up early, so I eventually got into the middle backseat of the white one. No problem! More than enough space and a great view on the interior and that MASSIVE 17″ central touch screen!

The ride itself was short, to short for me, but I get why. They had only 3 cars and 2.000 attendees to satisfy. I’d like to see it different, but I understand the how and why.

We did a short slalom and a acceleration demonstration on the straight. With 5 persons in the car it didn’t take long to reach 73mph before we had to slow down. No, it’s not as fast as a Roadster, but definitely faster than any other sedan I’ve ever driving! (Which are quite a few descent cars).

After the test-ride we exited the area through a tent where a demo of the central screens functions was being displayed and we saw the new charging connector and “UMC” for the Model S.

Tesla choose to design a new connector which was able to handle both 20kW AC charging as well as 90kW DC charging over the same pins. As a European I asked about the 3-phase support for the Model S and I got a disappointing answer, it’s not present.. I had a (and really good!) discussion with some Tesla employees about this matter. Well, it seemed we disagreed on that. So I started a petition to convince Tesla otherwise.

My final conclusion about the Model S? Full of gadgets, smooth and gorgeous! For me this is how automotive transportation should be. I’ve been hating the in-car systems for the last few years. They always to lacked features and we waaaaaaay behind on what is possible. I’ve driving Audi, Mercedes, BMW and Toyota, but all their systems seemed like they were build in 2000! The Model S however is cutting edge!

I didn’t have the time to play with the system, but from Elon’s demonstration and the other things I saw that night it proofed to me that the Model S will not only be a EV, but it will be my new mobile office! More than enough space, the world at your fingers through the 3G (maybe 4G) connectivity of the car and all that in a luxurious and spacious vehicle.

Of course, there still is work to do for Tesla. But hey, the vehicles were called “betas” for a reason. I work in IT and know what the words “Alpha” and “Beta” mean. As soon as they start using “RC” we can start judging on the finished touches!

The event itself was well prepared and organized. More than enough snack (good ones!) and drinks available and enough Tesla staff to bother will the dozens of questions I had.

I can’t wait any more! I feel like a little kid who wishes at the end of his birthday that he can sleep for a year, so it’s his birthday again the next day

I don’t want to sound like a fanboy (but I guess I do…), but Tesla is really showing some awesome work here. The Model S is simply more than a car, it’s a experience.

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For some more pictures of the event check out the already mentioned Picasa album of Ben Goodwin or check out the Tesla Motors Club forum. The last one contains much, much, much more information gathered at the event, as well more pictures and videos of the event.

The title might seem a bit cryptic, but this post is about a High Available Nexenta cluster with the RSF-1 we are deploying.

While we are waiting for the moment where we can start using Ceph we are implementing new storage for our hosting clusters. Our current Linux machines with LVM and XFS are not up to the task anymore.

After some testing and discussing we chose to use Nexenta. What Nexenta is and how awesome ZFS is can be found on other places on the net, I’m not going to discuss that here.

I wanted to publish our findings about the HA plugin and NFS.

In short, we have two headends connected with two SAS JBOD’s. The RSF-1 plugin makes sure the ZPOOL is imported on one headend at the time. If one headend fails, the plugin automatically fails the pool over to the other headend.

The plugin provides one HA IP which is shared between the headends, you probably get the point.

We’ve been doing some testing and noticed that when we mount NFS (v3) over TCP the failover takes a staggering 6 minutes! Well, the failover doesn’t take 6 minutes, but that’s the time it takes for the TCP connections to recover.

When mounting over UDP the service is continued in 50 seconds, so that’s a big difference!

Some testing showed that this is due to the following kernel settings:

net.ipv4.tcp_retries1 = 3
net.ipv4.tcp_retries2 = 15

This page explains what those two values actually control.

We’ve been experimenting with those values and lowering retries1 to 1 gave us the same recovery times as with UDP, but sometimes the recovery would still take 6 minutes..

For now I advise to use NFS with UDP (which gives better performance anyway), but if you need to use TCP for some reason try fiddling with these values.

When it comes down to storage under Linux you have a lot of great options if you are looking for local storage, but what if you have so much data that local storage is not really an option? And what if you need multiple servers accessing the data? You’ll probably take NFS or iSCSI with a clustered filesystem like GFS or OCFS2.

When using NFS or iSCSI it will come down to one, two or maybe three servers storing your data, where one will have a primary role for 99.99% of the time. That is still a Single Point-of-Failure (SPoF).

Although this worked (and still is) fine, we are running into limitations. We want to store more and more data, we want to expand without downtime and we want expansion to go smoothly. Doing all that under Linux now is a ……. Let’s say: Challenge.

Energy costs are also rising, if you like it or not, it does influence the work of a system administrator. We were used to having a Active/Passive setup, but that doubles your energy consumption! In large environments that could mean a lot of money. Do we still want that? I don’t think so.

Distributed storage is what we need, no central brain, no passive nodes, but a fully distributed and fault tolerant filesystem where every node is active and it has to scale easily without any disruption in service.

I think it’s nearly there and they call it Ceph!

Ceph is a distributed file system build on top of RADOS, a scalable and distributed object store. This object store simply stores objects in pools (which some people might refer to as “buckets”). It’s this distributed object store which is the basis of the Ceph filesystem.

RADOS works with Object Store Daemons (OSD). These OSDs are a daemon which have a data directory (btrfs) where they store their objects and some basic information about the cluster. Typically a data directory of a OSD is a one hard disk formatted with btrfs.

Every pool has a replication size property, this tells RADOS how many copies of an object you want to store. If you choose 3 every object you store on that pool will be stored on three different OSDs. This provides data safety and availability, loosing one (or more) OSDs will not lead to data loss nor unavailability.

Data placement in RADOS is done by CRUSH. With CRUSH you can strategically place your objects (and it’s replica’s) in different rooms, racks, rows and servers. One might want to place the second replica on a separate power feed then the primary replica.

A small RADOS cluster could look like this:

This is a small RADOS cluster, three machines with 4 disks each and one OSD per disk. The monitor is there to inform the clients about the cluster state. Although this setup has one monitor, these can be made redundant by simple adding more (odd number is preferable).

With this post I don’t want to tell you everything about RADOS and the internal working, all this information is available on the Ceph website.

What I do want to tell you is how my experiences are with Ceph at this point and where it’s heading.

I started testing Ceph about 1.5 years ago, I stumbled on it when reading the changelog of 2.6.34, that was the first kernel where the Ceph kernel client was included.

I’m always on a quest to find a better solution for our storage, right now we are using Linux boxes with NFS, but that is really starting to hurt in many ways.

Where did Ceph get in the past 18 months? Far! I started testing when version 0.18 just got out, right now we are at 0.31!

I started testing the various components of Ceph, started on a small number of virtual machines, but currently I have two clusters running, a “semi-production” where I’m running various virtual machines with RBD and Qemu-KVM. My second cluster is a 74TB cluster with 10 machines, each having 4 2TB disks.

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
[2a00:f10:113:1:230:48ff:fed3:b086]:/   74T  13T   61T  17% /mnt/ceph

As you can see, I’m running my cluster over IPv6. Ceph does not support dual-stack, you will have to choose between IPv4 or IPv6, where I prefer the last one.

But you are probably wondering how stable or production ready it is? That question is hard to answer. My small cluster where I run the KVM Virtual Machines (through Qem-KVM with RBD) has only 6 OSDs and a capacity of 600GB. It has been running for about 4 months now without any issues, but I have to be honest, I didn’t stress it either. I didn’t kill any machines nor did hardware fail. It should be able to handle those crashes, but I haven’t stressed that cluster.

The story is different with my big cluster. In total it’s 15 machines, 10 machines hosting a total of 40 OSDs, the rest are monitors, meta data servers and clients. It started running about 3 months ago and since I’ve seen numerous crashes. I also chose to use the WD Green 2TB disks in my cluster, that was not the best decision. Right now I have a 12% failure rate of these disks. While the failure of those disks is not a good thing, it is a good test for Ceph!

Some disk failures caused some serious problems causing the cluster to start bouncing around and never recovering from that.. But, about 2 days ago I noticed two other disks failing and the cluster fully recovered from it while a rsync was writing data to it. So, it seems to be improving!

During my further testing I have stumbled upon a lot of things. My cluster is build with Atom CPU’s, but those seem to be a bit underpowered for the work. Recovery is heavy for OSDs, so whenever something goes wrong in the cluster I see the CPU’s starting to spike towards the 100%. This is something that is being addressed.

Data placement goes in Placement Group’s, aka PGs. The more data or OSDs you add to the cluster, the more PGs you’ll get. The more PGs you have, the more memory your OSDs start to consume. My OSDs have 4GB (Atom limitation) each. Recovery is not only CPU hungry, but it will also eat your memory. Although the use of tcmalloc reduced the memory usage, OSDs sometimes use a lot of memory.

To come to some sort of a conclusion. Are we there yet? Short answer: No. Long answer: No again, but we will get there. Although Ceph still has a long way to go, it’s on the right path. I think that Ceph will become the distributed storage solution under Linux, but it will take some time. Patience is the key here!

The last thing I wanted to address is the fact that testing is needed! Bugs don’t reveal themselves you have to hunt them down. If you have spare hardware and time, do test and report!

Recently we purchased a EqualLogic PS6000XVS for a KVM environment.

In most of our iSCSI systems we use Multipath I/O, we do this by giving the iSCSI Target two NIC’s and give each NIC a IP-Address in a different subnet over a physically different network. This way we have two seperate I/O path’s to the iSCSI Target.

The EqualLogic does not support this, it only supports one virtual IP in one network, so multipathing gets a bit difficult.

On the Dell Wiki there is configuration howto, so I read that carefully.

The examples are for RedHat, but we are using Ubuntu, but that should not make a big difference, but it did….

Our storage network is in the subnet 192.168.32.0/19 where the virtual IP of the EqualLogic is 192.168.32.1. You should know, this is a virtual IP, in total we have three PS6000 nodes, which do some magic by responding with a different MAC Address for 192.168.32.1 towards each client.

One of our clients has the following configuration for the storage connectivity:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 14:FE:B5:C6:62:E0
          inet addr:192.168.37.4  Bcast:192.168.63.255  Mask:255.255.224.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:9000  Metric:1
          RX packets:27263332 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:25323692 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:24569609290 (22.8 GiB)  TX bytes:132201626154 (123.1 GiB)
          Interrupt:170 Memory:e6000000-e6012800 

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 14:FE:B5:C6:62:E2
          inet addr:192.168.38.4  Bcast:192.168.63.255  Mask:255.255.224.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:9000  Metric:1
          RX packets:27246580 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:25335109 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:24549507448 (22.8 GiB)  TX bytes:132201622012 (123.1 GiB)
          Interrupt:178 Memory:e8000000-e8012800

It took some work to get this working. Bot NIC’s are connected to the same subnet, through different switches though.

The first problem you will run into is the ARP flux problem of Linux, I’m not going to write to much about this, on the internet there is more then enough information written about this topic.

I ended up with this configuration:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 192.168.37.4
        netmask 255.255.224.0
        post-up sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.eth0.rp_filter=0
        post-up sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.eth0.arp_ignore=1
        post-up sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.eth0.arp_announce=2

auto eth2
iface eth2 inet static
        address 192.168.38.4
        netmask 255.255.224.0
        post-up sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.eth2.rp_filter=0
        post-up sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.eth2.arp_ignore=1
        post-up sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.eth2.arp_announce=2

For Open-iSCSI I created two interfaces called ieth0 and ieth1 and routed my iSCSI traffic through them. How you can do this can be found at the Dell wiki.

But it did not work! I was able to ping the EqualLogic over eth0, but not over eth1. If I brought down eth0, it would work over eth1, but not vise versa. It took me a while to find it, but it’s due to a default setting in Ubuntu, done in /etc/sysctl.d/10-network-security.conf, this enables rp_filter (Reverse Path Filtering) by default, so I modified that file

# Turn on Source Address Verification in all interfaces to
# prevent some spoofing attacks.
#net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter=1
#net.ipv4.conf.all.rp_filter=1

And voila! My iSCSI multipathing started to work! My multipath shows:

[size=1.0T][features=1 queue_if_no_path][hwhandler=0][rw]
\_ round-robin 0 [prio=2][active]
 \_ 13:0:0:0 sdk 8:160 [active][ready]
 \_ 14:0:0:0 sdj 8:144 [active][ready]
eql-0-8a0906-4f2b9e409-2b800184d024d9db_c () dm-4 EQLOGIC,100E-00
[size=2.0T][features=1 queue_if_no_path][hwhandler=0][rw]
\_ round-robin 0 [prio=2][active]
 \_ 6:0:0:0 sdg 8:96  [active][ready]
 \_ 11:0:0:0 sdf 8:80  [active][ready]

This should work under Ubuntu 10.04. Took me some time to figure it all out, but now it’s working like a charm. But still, I prefer multipathing over two different VLAN’s and subnets, really odd that the EqualLogic does not support this!

Finally, after waiting for a long time, the Roadster has arrived!

It’s not my car, but my colleagues car, but I think I’m just as excited about it as he is, what a great car!

A few weeks ago I wrote about the charging infrastructure we realized at our office. After one day, we already used 64kWh. Yes, we have been flooring the accelerator to the bottom

On the pictures above you see how the Roadster is charging. For now, 32A really seems to be enough at home/office, we have been flooring it all day and haven’t been able to drain the battery. Between our short drives it has been connected to the 32A connector, just charging for 1.5 hours gives you enough range to have fun!

The previous post about my electric scooter was in Dutch, but this time I’ll write my update in English.

It has been some time ago since I made this picture, but it’s still valid. Due to the rain, snow and cold I haven’t been using the scooter that much, it’s at 1100km now.

After 1100km it’s still working fine, I had no malfunction or whatsoever, it just works!

I’ve been calculating how much energy I used. I know the battery is 1.8kWh and the specs say I should get some 70 ~ 100km on a charge, but let’s say it’s 50 (My record on one day is 67km).

For 1100km, I had to recharge 22 times. 22 times * 1.8kWh = 39.6kWh. Assuming the efficiency when charging is 85%, that brings the total amount of energy at 46.58kWh.

46kWh of energy! A liter of gasoline holds 10kWh, so I’ve used 4.6L of gasoline for 1100km. 1L:239KM, that is some efficiency!

The current price of a kWh is EUR 0.22, so these 1100km’s costed me only EUR 10.25!

Hopefully spring comes early this year, so I can start driving on my scooter again!

As you might have read, a friend of mine (also my colleaugue) has ordered a Tesla Roadster, so we had to do some preparations for the charging infrastructure.

We live in The Netherlands (Middelburg, Zeeland) where we have two offices. Our main office is at the city center, but we also have second office which is outside the city and has a private parking deck, ideal for charging your Roadster!

One of the problems you have in Holland is that our whole infrastructure is based on 3-phases, while the Roadster only supports 1-phase charging. A lot of offices are connected to one or more phases with a 25A or 35A breaker (one breaker per phase ofcourse). Yes, we have 230V, so 35A should give you around 8kW of power, but it would still take 6.6 hours to fully charge the Roadster. But that is the situation here, you can’t use more than 32A (breaker is at 35A) on one phase. The 3-phase system has to be balanced, so when you want to use more then 32A, the load should be spreaded over the 3-phases.

Our office had one breaker of 35A, which was enough for just the office (5 desks and some servers), but it wouldn’t be enough for charging a Roadster. After contacting the utility company they told me that the first step was to go from 1x35A to 3x40A, so that is what we did.

That was our old main breaker, as you can see, there are two (Black and Grey) unused phases, the utility company came over and they connected the two extra phases and installed a 3-phase kWh meter.

After that was done we contacted a local electrician who could expand our fusebox. Since I made a reservation for a Model S, we choose to use both extra phases for charging EV’s.

This resulted in two charging stations of 230V 32A at the parkingdeck, both connected to their own 32A breaker. After there work was done, our fusebox looked like:

At the parking deck we installed two 32A single phase sockets, we have two parking places next to each other

The connector which we will be using to charge the Roadster is a CEE Form 32A Single Phase connector:

Compare that to the 16A connector:

While charging stations are being installed more and more, they are not everywhere. Every outlet in the wall is a charging station, so why not use it? I created some converters which would enable him to charge his Roadster anywhere:

I’m still waiting for some connectors to create a 3×32 to 1x32A converter, but it’s the same as the 3x16A to 1x16A converter showed above, but then a bit bigger.

For now, we only have to charge this Roadster:

To be continued!