Energy Monitoring

As part of my work on EveryWatt, our fledgling energy monitoring web site, I needed a way to consolidate log messages from all the data loggers we have running in a single place. If you're not familiar with it, Python's logging module is good stuff and worth checking out. We already used it for logging to files locally, and the module defines an HTTPHandler that can deliver log messages to a remote server via HTTP.

As part of my work on EveryWatt, I setup an NFS-based development environment for one of the data loggers we use for energy monitoring in the Caktus office. The stock 2.4 Linux kernel in the machine seemed to have some trouble mounting the file system root I had exported from one of our servers. The symptoms included long delays for most if not all activities that used the file system and lots of messages like these in dmesg: