Re: [sudo-sys] let's fix sudobot to warn us when omnidoor is down - sudo-sys

17 Jan 2017

There's an outlet on the east wall near the cafe counter, about 6 feet off
the ground. It has "NEVER UNPLUG" written on it in marker. The entire door
system is powered by an orange extension cord which leads to this outlet.
The end of this cord used to be three-prong but somebody knocked the third
prong off, so it doesn't stay put, and every time it falls out even a
little bit, the door system and camera get powered off. I covered the whole
thing in duct tape before I left last night so hopefully that won't be a
problem anymore.

I hate working with the door system code because the execution environment,
and basically that whole server, is a mess which makes me feel frustrated
every time I deal with it. That machine is also acting as our router, and
the entire Omni network is running without a firewall because nobody else
wants to deal with it either. I would be very interested in setting up a
new relatively low-power machine to be the router and reassigning this one
to just be a shell server. Then that can give us more flexibility to
overhaul it without causing network downtime.

If somebody can find and set up the new hardware i can take care of
everything else. All it would need is a few gigs of disk space and at least
2 ethernet ports.

On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 1:28 AM, Jake &lt;jake(a)spaz.org&gt; wrote:
...
  so I don't know what happened before I arrived,
except that yar said
 "i fixed it by plugging it in" and I don't know what exactly that means,
and
...
  i
 would like to know exactly.

 anyway, when I got there the beaglebone black was somehow powered off (no
 LEDS)
 but it had 5v being supplied to it. I have no idea what caused that.

 i power cycled the beaglebone black AND the USB hub's power source (which is
...
  separate) and then everything worked. Someone should
install a button in
 the
 cabinet to do a reset like that. for some reason, when the BBB and USB hub
 are
 not both power cycled, it can lead to a situation where the doorjam program
...
  doesn't connect to the magstripe reader and
everyone is unhappy.

 it would have been nice if sudobot had alerted us to the fact that it was
 not
 hearing back from the front door computer, but i think that functionality
 has
 been disabled? I can't tell why it doesn't work.

 https://github.com/sudoroom/sudobot

 fixing the bot, so it alerts us when there is a problem, should be our next
...
  step toward higher reliability of the front door
system.

 does anyone volunteer to do that? it's running on the sudoroom server (in
 the
 building) under its own username, using psy as a process manager.

 -jake

 On Mon, 16 Jan 2017, Jake wrote:

  i don't see any difference between the way it
looks in image 5817 and the
 way
 it's looked for months... the bottom screw may have fallen out (it wasn't
 really sticking into anything anyway) but it also may have been missing
 for a
 long time.

 in the second image, 5819, it looks like someone pushed it to the left on
 its
 one screw.

 i'll go there later tonight to see what's going on.

 for right now, i see that I can't even log into the front door computer.
 It
 has an internal battery backup, so if it was unplugged from AC it should
 have
 said something in IRC about the battery getting low. I said a while ago
 that
 we needed a dedicated ethernet to it, since presently its ethernet
 connection
 is passing through a switch which can get unplugged easily, instantly
 disconnecting it from the internet and its ability to alert us to
 problems.

 my guess is that the switch and the door computer both got unplugged from
 electricity, and the battery ran out (with no way to alert us) and then
 people
 started messing with the card reader since it wasn't working to let them
 in.

 -jake

 On Mon, 16 Jan 2017, Yardena Cohen wrote:

  It looks like somebody handled it roughly.
It's partially falling off
 and the wires are messed up.
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