Y’all must be wondering why I haven’t been doing much on my Miata lately. It’s not that I have given up on the project. I have definitely NOT given up on the project. It’s a matter of the weather out in Arizona. The weather in Arizona has been reaching temperatures of around 105-plus. The rays from the sun are so harsh that you could get a tan in matter of minutes even if you used sunblock with a SPF of 70.

I have been having issues with the A/C, cooling of the engine, and the such. In a previous post, I thought about removing the A/C system and implement an electrical A/C system.

So right now, I’m just riding the summer out because it’s extremely uncomfortable in the Miata while rollin in direct sunlight in the 105+ degree heat.

I rebuilt my entire server configuration for two things: lower power consumption and better redundancy and fault tolerance. Below, You can see my picture that I took of my servers in my hallway closet. This server is the server that is hosting this site right now.

This is how I’m able to sustain the site financially. The gray server on the right is a Dell Inspiron 530 with a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 processor and loaded with 8GB of RAM and has a PQI 32GB SSD HDD in it. The HDD contains only VMWare ESXi 4.0 as the virtualization system.

The server on the left, the black box, is built with 8 Seagate Momentus 5400.6 320GB 5400RPM SATA HDD’s. Why those? They consume only 0.9-1.4 watts per HDD as opposed to my former configuration that sucked about 5-15 watts per HDD. I had 4 in the previous set-up. Now, this black box is an iSCSI box that also has a PQI 32GB SSD HDD that runs Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit and iSCSI Enterprise Target 0.4.16 (IET). I have about 2.2TB of usable space on this iSCSI system. I’m using RAID-5 with a HP RAID controller with the LSI Logic chipset that I picked up on eBay with the 256MB write cache with battery backup. I yield about nearly 650MB/s read and 450MB/s write, sequentially.

Basically what’s happening here is that I have 6 total servers that run on the ESX box and the 6 servers are actually just “files” on the iSCSI box with a dual gigabit direct line in between.

VMWare ESX allows me to better utilize my server resources by manipulating how much resources one system consumes and lets me stretch my operating budget. I’m consuming no more than 120 watts altogether. Thanks to the ultra low power Core 2 Duo processors and the ultra low power HDD’s. Because of the extreme low power consumption, the servers give off less heat than a 120 watt bulb. There’s no need for me to ventilate or cool my closet because of how low the radiant heat is. I was sucking about almost 450 watts before. That’s going to make a big impact on my electric bill in the coming months.

The beige tower on the very left is my UPS unit that will hold this set up for a good 1 hour or a bit more because of the extremely low consumption.

I have decided to toss the entire A/C system and approach this differently. I saw an advertisment on TV the other day and it sparked a new idea. Electric A/C! WTF. I saw this cheesy commercial for the Prius that has solar panels on its roof that is supposed to help power the electronic A/C unit that it has. I was thinking, that I could probably pull this off by using some kind of window A/C or something like that.

The only obstacle I would have is dealing with the freon plumbing. Using a blower and reposition the condenser outside the car somewhere. I was thinking, holy crap, this is definitely do-able. No more robbing the engine of precious HP. Better emissions as a result. I have a 160 AMP alternator on my engine and with plenty of energy to provide.

What do you guys think?

Apologies… my site was down for almost two days. I was working on a catastrophic failure of one of the database hard drives. Fortunately, I had everything backed up and using RAID-1, mirroring on my server.

The site should be back up, but my email is still funky… still working that out. The domain controller that my Exchange 2007 server uses got hosed because, idiotically, I didn’t have a second domain controller. Lesson learned. But, the up-side is that there is no data lost though. Just a bunch of reconfiguring. No big deal.

I spent about an hour and a half working on removing the old slave clutch cylinder today after work. I discovered that the old slave clutch cylinder was indeed old and worn out. I read somewhere that if the fluid changes color quickly after you’ve flushed it out and bled it with brand new fluid, the old clutch cylinder is definitely going bad.

In my case, the fluid would immediately change as I was bleeding it. That is definitely a problem. So, now, with the new Luk slave cylinder I put on… it feels definitely new and the fluid color is remaining consistent and there are no leaks to call for yet. I drove the car around for quite a bit with the new slave clutch cylinder and it does feel much better. More consistent is more like it.