Integrating the New Wendy Street Butts Pi into the System

[TerryJC]

Hamish,

I've hit a snag in that the PSU Brick that I was intending to use doesn't actually deliver it's advertised current and the replacement andI found seems to stop the sensor probe working. (I'd been using my bench PSU,)

I would suggest that you don't need to come down to WMT until around 3ish.

[TerryJC]

Sitrep:

We installed the new hardware into the system yesterday and it seems to be working well.

However, we did have some issues:

1. Intermittent loss of network connectivity. This may be down to the old problem of poor Cat 5 connectors. We'll monitor this going forward.
2. The system time was out of synchronisation. The master Pi was keeping the correct time, so the hardware clock is working. However, it was established that the remotes were not being updated by the rdate command. The response was:
   

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   rdate: Could not connect to socket: Connection refused:

   I brought that problem home to research.

When we left, the system appeared to be working OK after we manually set the clock on wbuttspi and g4gatepi.

This morning I discovered the cause of the failure of rdate. When I installed this system back in 2017, I'd had the same problem and the LUG helped me solve it. As well as the remotes needing to have rdate installed, the master needs something to serve up the time. There are several suitable time servers, but without access to the Internet, xinetd is the easiest to set up and configure. The main problem is that without the Internet, I need to install the xinetd package (and its dependencies) onto sumppi before deployment or else manually; preferably without shutting it down. The answer is to use apt-get to list the packages needed and then download them onto another computer. Once obtained they can be copied onto sumpi and installed with:

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sudo dpkg -i *.deb

The procedure is given at http://www.penguintutor.com/raspberrypi/apt-get-offline.

Once installed, the Time server needs to be enabled in xinetd.d/time. I've added the full procedure to the Installation Spec.

I tested this on a couple of Pis here at home and it seems to work fine. I won't have time to go to WMT today, so I'll probably pop in to do it tomorrow morning.

[TerryJC]

I installed the xinetd packages onto sumppi by copying the .deb files over as described above. I then rebooted all three machines (having first downloaded the Results and Logs; see the Status Topic).

After the reboot, I examined /var/log/syslog and was able to see xinetd started and the time service running.

Apart from monitoring the system going forward, the new Wendy Street Butts Pi integration would appear to be complete.

[Penri]

I made a sinker for the Wendy House butts probe today which should be ready to install in a day or two. I want the concrete to set hard before immersing.

Can I disconnect the probe to reinstall into its new tube without powering down the RPi?

[TerryJC]

Yes. Although, you'll obviously get funny results when you do it.

It's probably worth me coming along when you do it to reboot all the Pis afterwards, so we could shut it down for a few minutes anyway.

[Penri]

Thanks Terry

I'm not sure when I'll go in yet, I'll post a time later on today.

Penri

[Penri]

I'll be at WMT from 14:00 tomorrow (Friday 17th).

[TerryJC]

Ok.

[TerryJC]

Penri fitted the 'fully fettled' probe this afternoon and I reset the Pis and gathered the Readings (posted under River System Status).

The system seems to be working as designed.

[hamishmb]

Excellent.