Midnite Solar Classic Status Panel questions..

[ChrisOlson]

This is exactly why it pisses me off when manufacturers do this crap. Take the easy route and piss in the face of customers who did not drink the M$ kool aid.

Well, I got my own rant on that.

I used linux for several years.  Started out with the CLOS distro (Corel Linux Operating System).  Then Corel either went belly up or quit supporting it.  It was a Debian port, so I switched to Debian.  Tried lots of others including the old Red Hat, Mandrake and several others.  But I grew familiar with Debian and stuck with it.  I think I finally quit using it when Sarge went stable and Etch was still in testing.  I still got a couple CD's around here with the Woody NetInstall image on them.

But over the 6 years or so that I used it, I had just as many, if not more, problems with linux as I had ever had with Windows.  Including several apt-get upgrades that went tits up, crashes due to incompatibility with hardware, applications with more bugs than a warm August night, and myriads of problems with KDE (never did like Gnome because it looked like something slapped together by a 4th grader).

I finally quit using it because I reached the realization that 99% of the applications I needed to use to get my work done are written for Windows.  It's the applications that make the computer useful - not the operating system underneath it all.  I decided that this "OS War" is more of a religion than anything else.  It might make you feel good, and even maybe superior to the Heathens that use Windows.  After all, you're one the Chosen Few when JFC descends out of the clouds.  But that don't make it practical.

So when somebody uses linux (Ubuntu - whatever - Ubuntu is just another Debian port) it's expected that what you do is spend most of your time trying to get stuff to work.  And bitch about it when a company writes a piece of software or builds a piece of hardware that's not supported.  That's what linux users do.  They think every company should support it.  But it's a business decision and few companies give a rip about Computing Religious Beliefs.

When it comes to servers, et al, linux has pretty much replaced the old Unix operating systems like Solaris.  It is the defacto standard in server applications.  But on the desktop Windows still rules, and likely will for some time to come.
</rant>

In your network router, reserve a IP block outside of the DHCP pool for static IP's.  Assign your Classic a static IP address in that reserved IP block.  Shut down the incoming power to the Classic, then shut off the battery power to it.  Turn on the battery power and let it boot up, then turn the incoming power back on.  Then delete or rename the com.midnitesolar.LocalStatusPanel folder that you'll find in the Application Data folder in your user account, fire up the Local Status Panel and try it again.

It could be a problem with the DHCP server in your network router (yes, most of those network routers run a linux kernel) and the way the Classic gets a DHCP lease.  When the lease expires and the Classic tries to renew the lease, it might not be getting one so it drops off the network.

Once you have a static IP assigned to it, if it stops communicating after awhile you can ping it to see if it's still active, and you can even telnet to it on port 502 - the Classic will answer a telnet call.
--
Chris

[Wolvenar]

 I know I shouldn't push the subject BUT Woody is ANCIENT..
but here is MY <RANT>
I would suggest updating your experience with Linux, just so you can assure yourself you are in the same mindset if nothing else .

99% of my computer time is spent on a Linux machine, even my cell phone is a glorified Linux (Maemo)
I am frustrated when I get on a windows machine and need 400 different 3rdparty apps to get my work done, when the standard linux distro has almost all of it by default. Seriously, I have the download link for putty, burned into my brain for eternity..
Also I cant stand needing to have 80x the hardware in order to run a massive antivirus/malware package and still have enough machine left to run an over flashy gui,
I normally need to strip it down just so it don't drive me batty.. Dont even get me started on MS new banner crap.. YUCK.

Most people I know of today sit down in front of a computer and spend most of their time in a web browser, or in an
 office software program ( OpenOffice.org, Koffice , Google Docs, MS office etc.)

I put my laptop down in front of someone who had never seen Linux, and they did not even know it.
No it was not a few minutes. He checked his Facebook stuff got his email, and then we played a few FPS games, and a couple old games in an emulator. and ended in showing off the public Minecraft server (running in linux)  I setup for mykids, and thier friends.
The Minecraft client runs within linux also, on that laptop.

After all that I asked how he liked Linux.."THAT WAS LINUX???" REALLY??"
He thought I had some wigged out looking theme.

Things are changing, and mostly because there are so many of us geeks demanding open standards.
Plus the fact that tablets and smart phones are pushing the industry that direction.
This is partly to avoid as many costly patent as possible, and partly to shift things to web apps so these devices can have the function without the storage, and horse power need.

Go grab windows 8, I think there is still a preview out there to download.
Then the latest Ubuntu.
Which installs easier?

I know where I will place my money on which one supports more hardware.
Ok yeah I am cheating, I have tried windows 8 and already know that answer.
Maybe lets make it more fair, and pit it against windows 7.
Plug in your 5 year old scanner, or any usb device (as they are easiest to test a bunch of devices with)..
Say maybe a sound card or mic, or.. web cam. you just bought off Newegg
Which one will have the drivers? Which one works plug and play, ( not plug and pray)
I installed on a few month old laptop and EVERYTHING was supported, all special buttons and the works

Point is Linux has made MASSIVE strides in the last couple years, it takes some rather odd or specialized circumstances where
Linux cant easily or even more effectively do the job in a way that would make you WANT to use a Linux distro

There is a reason M4 is branching out. It has lost the browser wars, and its seeing the end of  Windows dominance in the not so distant future. They tried to stop it with litigations and only shot themselves in the foot.

Anyhow..
Now what I DO hate is Ubuntu's new shell.. it sucks royal <CENSORED><CENSORED><CENSORED><CENSORED><CENSORED>
I just boot into an older shell mode, or install KDE.

</RANT>

Not trying to rub ya the wrong way or anything just I think your concept is out of date.

---Edit.. Tom if you preferr to move this out into its own with a copy of Chris's post do so.---
---its your thread,so it's your call---

[ChrisOlson]

I got a 5 or 6 GB empty disc partition on my laptop so I should probably throw the latest version of Ubuntu on it to see what they got now.

At the time, Windows 98 was out there, and not too bad.  But ME was a disaster of biblical proportions.  Debian, at the time, was an alternative to spending the money up on the upgrade path to Win2K.  It would run on my older hardware where Win2K wouldn't.

I'm at that same point again.  I got Win XP Pro, and I like it.  It's been rock stable for me and I've never run any anti-virus stuff in it.  It's fast, familiar and it works.  My wife has Vista on her Dell laptop and that's about as much of a disaster as Windows ME was.  I've heard Windows 7 is better - never used a computer that has it.  But there's nothing wrong with my Dell Inspiron laptop, except that it won't run Windows 7.  So when XP is no longer supported, I'll probably throw a Debian type distro on it to make it useful until the hardware dies.

But in the meantime, I do have many apps that are only written for Windows.  So we'll see.  I used Mac OS X for awhile too, and had one of the older stainless steel PowerBooks with a G4 PowerPC processor.  That was probably the absolute best (and most stable) operating environment (and hardware) I ever used.  The main problem with it being lack of application support for some of the applications I need to run on Windows.
--
Chris

[tomw]

Tom I am under the assumption.. ( yeah yeah) that its ip enabled, and that it is getting its ip address via DHCP.
With that in mind, can the IP be statically configured? There may be a bug in the way it deals with DHCP receive.

This comes to mind because I have seen this problem with network printers dropping out after working for a period of time.
Or failing that, maybe you can set your DHCP server to give a perm allocation to the mac address?

At least its something to try.

I tried the static IP, I tried on my internal LAN and on its own network with just it and my computer on a hub. When its locked up for the Status Panel I can still telnet in and ping it so I doubt it is how it gets its IP.

@ Chris:

I used Debian for a long time but their rigid "standards" screwed up keeping things current by imposing unrealistic requirements for the distribution repositories. I finally bailed out on it because it was getting to be a major PITA to use the newer applications and features. Plus those upgrades that corrupted an otherwise well running system.

I am not religious about it and do not need my computer for business these days so I chose to use Ubuntu. I have very minimal issues with it other than things like the updater for the Classic or other M$ only vendor applications. I won't argue it with you because I have learned by observation you are a last word warrior as I tend to be and I can't spend time on that kind of dialog. No offence we are are who we are.  If I could back up a release or two using what I have for hardware on the Classic I would until they get it sorted out but I have to haul it elsewhere to do it due to things specific to me.  Certainly not the end of the world but a PITA.

It may well be me but I have never, ever had an install of Windows that worked properly for me and have had many years of no hassle Linux installs doing what I use a computer for.

Just from here.

I am actually quite happy with this Classic as a controller and am considering another for the current panels after the upgrade on solar happens here.  Software glitches are pretty common in many systems and this is fairly minor in the overall scheme of things but one big reason I coveted a Classic was the ethernet interface and the possibility of data logging locally.  I wonder if this affects their online logging stuff? I won't use that as I am a bit uncomfortable with too much info being out in the wild, "secured" or not.

The original post was posted @ 4 AM before coffee or fully awake so my attitude was bad not being a morning person.

I figure they will sort it out and once I am confident it is good to go I will haul it to my buddys and redo the firmware again.

Chris, you can simply download and burn a "Live CD" and try it straight off the CD. It is a bit sluggish off CD but does give a taste of how it works these days. Linux has matured a LOT since I installed Slackware from a CD in the book "Running Linux" longer ago than I care to admit and it took 23 hours to compile a kernel on a 386 SX. I use(d) it mostly for servers in those days and have had one Linux install or another running 24/7 for a good decade or more. Usually without issues.

'nuff said.

Tom

[ChrisOlson]

I used Debian for a long time but their rigid "standards" screwed up keeping things current by imposing unrealistic requirements for the distribution repositories. I finally bailed out on it because it was getting to be a major PITA to use the newer applications and features

Yeah, the stable releases were really slow back then.  It seems to me I used hamm for a short time, then I was slink for about a year, and potato went for a long time before sarge went stable.  Sarge was pretty quick and then woody lasted forever.  I was running woody out of testing long before they made it a stable release, and when I tried to update some of the packages from stable it broke.  I fought thru it and never did install etch, as that's the point where I gave up on it.

I know when Ubuntu came along, it was supposed to be a more actively developed Debian-based distribution, but by that time I had lost interest in it.  In fact, that was when I had the Mac and I would still be using that except for the fact that it won't run some of the software I need.  So I finally bought the Dell Inspiron that I got now that came with XP Pro loaded in it, and have never had a single problem with it.

I got a totally empty 6.3 GB disc partition on this computer and I will probably download the Ubuntu install and look it over when I get time.  Just to see what advancements have been made, and if it supports the proprietary Dell hardware (built-in wireless and ethernet on the motherboard - just the kind of stuff I used to have problems with in Debian).  I just looked at their site and I see they got a Windows Installer package that looks kind of neat.

The other thing would be is that I got a digital TV tuner that hooks into our satellite so I can watch TV on my computer with this program called "Media Center".  I use that a LOT - especially to record TV programs that I want to watch later, like Gold Rush which I never have time to watch when it comes on.  The Media Center will wake my computer up and record the TV program for me, then puts the computer back to sleep again after it gets done recording it.

So it could be an interesting comparison to see if it has features I like, and stuff that I find useful and use on Windows all the time.

One of the things that turned me off on linux in the early days was when things didn't work, basically the only support you could find was on email lists and/or forums.  The linux userbase seems to think they're the Gods Of Computing and I got tired of all the Microsoft bashing eventually.  When my apt-get upgrade to woody stable broke I remember I asked on some email list how I could fix it, and basically what I got was a long time user and "expert" pretty much tell me how stupid I am for not doing this and that and whatever before I did a full bore upgrade to the stable release, which I HAD been running out of testing for damn near a year.  Those were the things that turned me off on it - I finally had the realization that it's the SOFTWARE APPLICATIONS that makes the computer useful.  And if those apps are written for Windows, then that's what you use.

Sorry about the thread hijack - but that's my 2 cents on the linux thing.
--
Chris

[halfcrazy]

Unfortunately, Adobe dropped support for AIR on linux platforms. 

Sorry, bad mood. N. Ariz. Wind & Sun just informed me the E-Panel I ordered a month ago and their website implied it was a stock item is back ordered "indefinitely due to an aluminum shortage" but only after I contacted them multiple times asking why they took my money and then ignored my questions on its ETA.  I had good luck with them before but this fiasco has gotten on my last nerve. 

/end rant

If anyone knows of a place with an MNE125AL-PLUS E-Panel in stock, please let me know.

OK on to something fun with coffee involved.

Tom

Tom
Aluminum Shortage?? I will check on this tomorrow first I heard of it.

Edit: I just checked into this and we did have a backup at our original sheet metal house. We have now got 6 sheet metal shops that we use and the Outback Epanels where sent to a couple others as well and may be punching them tomorrow.

Ryan

[halfcrazy]

Wanted to jump in and bring everyone up to speed. The issue Tom is having seems to pop up from location to location. The odd thing is we obviously know it is a bug in the Classic but why? I can say for sure that I have seen a particular classic run flawlessly for a good long while then it gets moved somewhere and the network code acts up like crazy.

Some people Like Chris for example found re doing the code fixed it but in reality the issue is still there and Andrew is working feverishly on it now. So be patient we are working on it. Also we are working towards doing a web page based gui instead of using AIR or Adobe for that matter. The beauty of this is it will be able to live on the hardware as well i am told so you could call it up via a IP address.

Also I believe we will be adding in the ability to redirect the outgoing data packets from our server to a server of your liking.

Thank you all for your patience we will get all this stuff settled in ASAP.

Ryan

[rossw]

Just adding to the religious war for a moment...

People, "linux" is not and never was "unix". I don't mean in the legal term, I don't mean had the rights to use the name, I mean as much as anything in the underlying philosophy.

If you look at most of the BSD-derived code, it goes through a rigorous testing phase. Changes are heavily peer-reviewed etc.
My experience (as limited as it is) with linux was that it was at best a "unix-like operating system", and that it was a "free-for-all". Anyone could do anything, submit changes etc, and that a lot of "very poor quality code" was included. This had huge impacts for stability and cross-system operation.

There are a plethora of linux versions. Hundreds is probably an order of magnitude low. Few of them are what I would call "solid".
But then, the more the non-microsoft world is fragmented, the stronger the microsoft collective gets. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The more people use doze, the more people use doze. (Add commas and emphasis to make it mean what you want).

[ChrisOlson]

My experience (as limited as it is) with linux was that it was at best a "unix-like operating system", and that it was a "free-for-all". Anyone could do anything, submit changes etc, and that a lot of "very poor quality code" was included. This had huge impacts for stability and cross-system operation.

I think Debian, at least back when I used it, tried to be careful with this.  Ian Murdock wrote a "Constitution" or some damn thing about how Debian was to be developed, released, and called "stable".  The time between stable releases was so great because of the requirements that people got pissed off and went and formed their own new distributions of linux (Ubuntu, etc..).  As a consequence 99% of all the linux distributions I ever tried were basically broken and buggy out of the gate.

I did run FreeBSD at one point too, and it was fine, just not as good of support for hardware as some of the linux distros.

Linux is most definitely NOT Unix.  It is not even close to being a descendant of the original Unix code written by Bell Labs.  It was invented by Linus Torvalds.

BSD is more of a branch of the AT&T Unix systems that we had when I was in college.  We had engineering workstations that ran either DEC ULTRIX or SunOS - both derivatives of BSD.

Nobody even knew what Microsoft Windows was back then.
--
Chris

[boB]

Yes, there is some kind of bug in the TCP stack which we are working hard on getting fixed.
As you've seen, you can still ping the Classic when it has stopped talking.

BTW, the Local App appears to work well on Mac OS X.
We have also used modpol, jamod (java modbus), modscan and other general purpose
modbus software to talk with the Classic over modbus over TCP/IP as well as USB to RS-232
links.  The USB jack on the Classic is not modbus although it does spit out some raw data
at around twice per second.

Aluminum shortage ?

boB

[tomw]

Aluminum shortage ?

boB

From the email explaining the delay:

the delay seems to be caused by a shortage of the aluminum for this particular E-panel. They do not know how long the issue will take to resolve and asked if you can use a steel chassis E-panel in its place.

Just like when I was in the Army, they don't tell me much.

And I paraphrased..

A lot of thought went into the Panel selection so I hope you guys can get one fabbed for me.

If you sold direct to the end user I would have ordered from the source.

No worries.

Things tend to work out in the end.

Good luck with that TCP stack.

Tom

[ChrisOlson]

Aluminum shortage ?

Yes.  Haven't you heard?  They're spraying people with it to reduce the population, so it's no wonder there's a shortage of the stuff.  It's on YouTube, so it's true:

LOL!
--
Chris

[frackers]

First off I should admit to writing embedded Linux stuff for a living - kernel drivers, real-time embedded apps (mostly comms based) and so on.

To compare Linux to Windows, I'll use the Slashdot analogy of a car.

Would you really go out and buy a car with the bonnet (hood) welded shut and where the seats and steering wheel were an option you had to pay extra for?

Hmmm - didn't think so...