The other day my dev server completely died, this was rather inconvenient to say the least. 24 hrs later and my new (excellent, very quiet, powerful but only consuming 150w) HP 54L Proliant Microserver was sitting on my desk ready for building.

I’ve done a server build so often that I can do it with my eyes closed , but usually miss something, so as I was in a hurry I referred to my previous post of the same name. As I did so the fact that it’s 7 years out of date became apparent. Compiling from source? Nah. Where’s Git? Not using sudo?

So, here I am re-writing from scratch for 2013…

Following these instructions will get you a Debian based PHP/MySQL development server set-up with the ability to have multiple developer sandboxes that are accessible from a remote machine on the local network, using Samba.

Time needed < 1hr

If you’re following these instructions verbatim then grab & install the newest netinst of Debian, it turns out that Wheezy was released only a few days ago, so that’s what I went with.

This machine is given a fixed DHCP lease on the LAN (192.168.1.4 in my case) and has the hostname of devian on the local LAN’s DNS server. I selected ssh server from the set of install profiles during the install so as soon as the OS is installed I can do the rest headless from my main machine.

ssh in, become root

su -

Add dotdeb to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://packages.dotdeb.org wheezy all
deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org wheezy all

Add the GnuPG key to stop avoid error messages when apt-getting:

wget http://www.dotdeb.org/dotdeb.gpg
cat dotdeb.gpg | sudo apt-key add -

Update.

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Install everything.

apt-get install vim bzip2 samba curl pwgen php5 php5-cli php5-mysql mysql-server apache2 git sudo ntp

Note ntp to keep the clock in sync & pwgen as I use all the time, the rest should be obvious, you can of course add your own to this.

Edit /etc/vim/vimrc and uncomment this if you want pretty (readable on a PuTTY terminal) colours when using vim.

syntax on
set background=dark

Edit /root/.bashrc, add this so vim is default editor when doing things like visudo and crotab -e as root

export EDITOR=vim

Re-login.

su -

Edit sudoers.

visudo

As it’s my local server I add this line for my username so I don’t have to supply a password each time, obviously this depends upon your security policies. For your other developers sharing the machine you might limit it to only certain commands..

bealers ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

Become your user.

su - bealers

Make your document root,

cd && mkdir www

Edit /home/you/.bashrc to do the vim thing again & also to add any bash aliases, here’s mine:

export EDITOR=vim
alias ls='ls --color=auto -Fhla --group-directories-first'
alias halt='sudo shutdown -h now'
alias reboot='sudo reboot'
alias ..='cd ..'
alias ...='cd ../..'
alias apres="sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart"
alias phplog="sudo tail -f /var/log/php.log"

Create an ssh key for gitlab/password-less remote shell access etc.

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Optionally, symlink php.ini so it’s the same for Apache and the CLI.

sudo cd /etc/php5/cli
sudo mv php.ini php.ini.cli && sudo ln -s ../apache2/php.ini

Edit php.ini with your own changes, for now we’ll just enable php logging.

error_log = /var/log/php.log

Create the log.

sudo touch /var/log/php.log && sudo chown www-data.www-data /var/log/php.log

Restart apache.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Condigure samba.

sudo vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

Edit it so the following is changed:

workgroup = SIFTWARE # this isn't so important these days

I comment out all default shares and create one new one, for multiple users you could make the username a variable. note the group permissions are pretty lax, You could easily tighten this up but you do need to ensure that files are automatically created from Windows so that the www-data (group) can read them. This works for me.

[docroot]
comment = This user's Apache docroot
browseable = Yes
read only = No
create mask = 0775
directory mask = 0775
path = /home/bealers/www

Restart.

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

Add user(s) to Samba. To keep things really simple your dev server samba username should match the username for your Windows desktop, ditto passwords. This should mean you don’t have to supply credentials when connecting to your share.

sudo smbpasswd -a bealers

On your desktop check out that you can see the share, if you don’t have a DNS server I’m assuming that you’ve put the dev server hostname into C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts

Windows+E then Alt+D then paste \\devian.siftware.local

Map the docroot folder as a network drive. You might need to ‘connect using different credentials’ if the Samba username or password are different to your Windows logged in user.

Create a file and folder via explorer then ls /home/you/www to make sure the permissions are OK.

Edit the default website in Apache (or create a new vhost for each user to point to their docroot) my /etc/apache2/sites-available/default looks like:

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

DocumentRoot /home/bealers/www
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
LogLevel warn

CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

Enable mod_rewrite.

sudo cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/
sudo ln -s ../mods-available/rewrite.load

Restart apache.

sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

Create phpinfo.

cd ~/www && echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" >> info.php

From your desktop’s web browser access http://devian.siftware.local, or, if you’ve set up a default vhost per developer then it’ll be http://dev.user (or whatever your naming convention is).

You should be able to see info.php, clicking on it should give you the php info screen.

You now can create vhosts for all your projects pointing them to the relevant folders within your docroot (or your various users’ docroots).

Within Windows you should be able to open/write/create these files within your IDE via the mapped drive.

There you go, I can get on with some work again now.

• OneNote: Ctrl + -
• Excel: Ctrl + 5
• Word: Ctrl + D (font menu) then Alt + K (tick strike-through) then Enter

Not exactly consistent, but useful nonetheless.

I’m trying to develop an MS Onenote add-on. This hard because I’m a web developer with LAMP skills so the world of C#, Visual Studio 2012, COM, Registries, DLLs and installers is all new to me. To make things worse it  seems that Onenote doesn’t qualify for a VSTO and its file format is still closed and binary where all the other office file formats are open and easy to parse.

Anyway, my addin wouldn’t load. So I thought I’d try and enable logging after seeing this post.

I eventually did get it working, of sorts using the following:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\OneNote\Options\Logging]

"EnableLogging"=dword:00000001
 "EnableTextFileLogging"=dword:00000001
 "ttidLogObjectModel"=dword:00000001
 "ttidLogObjectModelAddins"=dword:00000001
 "ttidLogIncludeTimeDateStamp"=dword:00000001
 "ttidLogMerge"=dword:00000001
 "ttidLogReplicationConcise"=dword:00000001
 "ttidLogCellStorageClientRequests"=dword:00000000
 "ttidLogNativeReplicator"=dword:00000000
 "ttidLogNotebookDiff"=dword:00000000
 "ttidLogObjectSpaceStoreCell"=dword:00000000
 "ttidLogReplicationScheduler"=dword:00000000
 "ttidLogServerFolderReplicator"=dword:00000000
 "ttidLogSharePointAndWebDAV"=dword:00000000
 "ttidLogEditorsTable"=dword:00000000
 "ttidLogSkyDrive"=dword:00000000
 "ttidLogMultiRoundTripSuspend"=dword:00000000

Save out as a .reg and then click on it.

Unfortunately this wasn’t much help to me as the majority of these items are logging user interaction within ON or between ON and SkyDrive. The two ObjectModel ones didn’t seem to do anything…

Note that I’ve set a lot of them to 00000000, this disables them again. Play with them to get best results. You probably want to create a second file with these in to disable logging again:

"EnableLogging"=dword:00000000
 "EnableTextFileLogging"=dword:00000000

Something else useful came out of this exercise and that was finding a windows equivalent to tail -f.

Fire up Powershell and run the following command on any updating text file, it’ll now update in real time.

PS C:\Users\Darren\AppData\Local\Temp> Get-Content .\OneNote15.log -wait

Getting a brew on

After our grand tour these past five years, 2013 is family Beale’s year of settling, observing and preparing.  We do have a long list of jobs but we can’t get them all done at once and we know that we need to plan ahead and prioritise rather than get stressed out about a mountain of work. I’ve also been working away a lot (not for much longer though, woohoo) and this has meant little time to get to the woods and get work done there too, much to my disgust.

Does not look like 600 trees

Come January and the whole 2012/2013 coppicing season being missed I was pretty urgent to have moved the woodland project along a bit so I ordered 600 willows as a practice plot for the wet not-much-useful-for-anything-else land that makes up the majority of our holding. The idea being that if they take ok then over the next 5 or so years we’ll plant up a large part of the land as a firewood coppice.

The trees sticks came quicker than expected and were then sat for a week in a large trug filled with water to promote root growth. I had 5 varieties. The plan being a large practice firewood – sorry ‘Biomass’ – coppice and the final 100 as a small trial basket weaving bed, the latter being planted much closer together to keep them skinnier.

Don’t do this, it’s bloody stupid.

Our – mine and a mate, Mel – first attempt was snowed off, we just got one fence post in the ground. Attempt 2 a week

later got all 500 of the firewood sticks in, as well as 2 further days to get the surrounding fence sorted (this would have been a single day’s work for 2 people, instead it was one day each between Mel and myself). The fence proved to be essential as we didn’t use guards (too expensive) we figured on a single boundary to stop the rabbits.

Mel’s awesome fence

We left the sticks for a few days whilst we got on with other things, like earning money, and on next visit just 3 days later there were already signs of rabbit damage!

The final half day was with the entire family and we planted 100 odd sticks in a morning whilst lunch was in the slow cooker at home (genius wife) using cardboard as a mulch.

It was a more expensive exercise than I’d expected:

• 600 trees @ £450 though at the end of year one we’ll cut them all back (to promote multi stem growth) which should give us 3000+ more trees if we want them
• Fencing material at £100. This was very low budget: VERY cheap & will immediately rust chicken wire, and all the fence posts were home felled & pointed. We definitely need some serious investment if we’re going to plant up 18 acres. This test plot was only 30 m²
• 6 days labour spread between 2 people with a guest star appearance from the Beale clan at the end. This would be a lot quicker next time and the fencing is definitely the biggest job.

We ended up with the following species mix

Isn’t daddy good with straight lines?

for the basket weaving bed:

• Harrisons x22
• Flanders Red x21
• Triandra x44
• Q83 x18
• Viminalis x15

and the much larger firewood bed:

• Viminalis 10 rows of 27
• White Tip 4 rows of 27
• Q89 4 rows of 27

Let’s hope the rabbits don’t get them all!

Grow baby, grow

Getting the basket bed ready

Powershell, much less sucky

Want to find your Windows start-up folder to add a new shortcut?

Win+E then clicking through Computer -> C: -> Users -> AppData -> i\forget\where\it\is\these\days

too much of a drag?

Try: Win+R then type shell:startup

I found a huge list here, most are a bit pointless but cialis online I can see a use for shell:SendTo also.

Don't use for launching apps, though. In that case it's all about ALT+SPACE and Launchy.

Please do not feed the Yeti

I just got back from an epic trip to the highlands of Scotland open canoeing with some mates.

We were prepared for the sort of weather that an October in northern Scotland could throw at us (which the weather forecasts were also suggesting would happen) but on this occasion they got it wrong and we really lucked out.

Day 0 was the trip up. This started at 5:30pm near Oswestry in North Shropshire and ended at around 5am the next morning when we arrived at the banks of Loch Morar.

Day 1 started after 2-hours-sitting-in-a-car-seat sleep and a large slug of rum. The wind wasn't as bad as we had feared but it was still a horrid headwind that meant we had to fight our way over medium-scary waves all day as we crawled east, with the feeling of sometimes going backwards. As we approached the end of the first day things started to brighten up, especially as we'd found a lovely camping spot on a beach full of driftwood. Naturally we had a fire and if we were not so exhausted from the exertions of the day I'm sure we'd have stayed up late into the night. As it was we ate well, drank all the stuff in tins to cut down weight, then crawled off to bed.

Not too shabby

Day 2 we started off by crossing the Loch, this is notable for 3 reasons:

1. Crossing open water is not for the faint hearted especially when in an open canoe whilst wearing wellies and lots of cold weather gear being on a body of water that has a fair bit of wind – waves being proportionally sized to the amount of wind, waves liking to fill up and/or tip over open boats – and is miles from any civilization;
2. The Loch was 3/4 mile wide at our crossing point;
3. Loch Morar is the UK's deepest body of freshwater at around 300m (1000ft) and we crossed at the deepest point. For context I used to live on a hill in Wales that was 1000ft+ above sea level; that felt high up (especially in winter when it got to -19!). On this crossing we were looking at the hills around us being of a similar height to the depths below;

This is blood heavy

As a reward for getting to the other side we now got to empty the boats and carry them and the gear around a mile up and over to Loch Nevis; we really enjoyed this bit, (especially having to do it twice).

Loch Nevis is a sea Loch so we now had tides to contend with so we waited until low tide (3pm) and then had a mad dash east to Sourlies Bothy before it got too dark. We only just made it.

After a gastronomic feast of freshly harvested (by us) mussels and a curry we had a quick game viagra of poker and then collapsed into bed again.

Day 3 broke with not a hint of wind so the water was like a mill pond; it was a real sight to behold…

Wes dropping some knowledge – Photo by Giles Atkinson

This not only meant we had an easy ride out – as we timed our departure for high tide – this also meant I could start to learn how to solo in the canoe that I now knew I'd be t

aking back home with me.

I got some expert tuition from Wes and I spent the rest of the day attempting to perfect the 'Knife-J' stroke as we headed towards Inverie.

The pub beckons

By 4pm it was most definitely pub o'clock which was fortunate as we arrived at Inverie home of The Old Forge, a pub that markets itself as “Mainland Britain's Remotest Pub”. Whether it's the remotest is up for debate but it's certainly 10 hours drive away from my home in Shropshire, you need a boat to get there and it has views to die for; so I think we'll let them off.

We had a few medicinal ales then wobbled around the coast 1/4 of a mile to the Foundation Bunkhouse where we paid to stay that night. Within the hour we were back in the pub as we'd pre-booked the week before to dine there. Naturally we had sea food to start but none of us could resist the venison burger for the main (which was *really* good). The pub had a great atmosphere as it was rammed due to there being a 'black tie' end of season get together where all of the estate's gamekeepers, gillies, deerstalkers etc were all getting well oiled.

Wobble back to bunkhouse, sleep in a bed.

Our own island (Skye in the far distance)

Day 4 was another calm day! This was the big one we had to head out to sea then cross the Loch at the narrow point with options for being pulled out to sea by the current and general capsize-atunities. I started off by soloing but the wind picked up and I struggled so Wes took over solo with Giles and myself in the other boat for the rest of the day.

The crossing ended up being fine as the wind dropped of AND we'd timed the crossing for the slack tide. This didn't stop us pausing on a little rock island for a bit to sip some celebratory Rum, though.

The final push was to Mallaig a few miles up the coast. We didn't stop long, opting to grab some beer supplies in the Co-op and head straight back out again (avoiding the car ferry that had just started its engines up).

This was to be a small hop around the coast to pick up the road to Loch Morar. Being on the sea was a whole different dynamic. The sea was relatively calm but we still had decent sized waves as well as breakers over now emerging rock outcrops (the tide was going out). We came to the conclusion that one of us capsizing was an inevitability which would be a shame given we'd had such a smooth trip so we beached ASAP.

Wes headed off the the road to hitch to the car and by the time Giles and I had carried all the stuff to the road – through someone's garden it turns out (they didn't mind) – he was back!

Oops, how did that get there?

The day 5 trip home was long but uneventful with me getting in around 9pm. I then that the job of explaining to Mrs B why there was a boat on my car…

Map of route

View Loch Morar to Mallaig in a larger map

I needed some way to encrypt my Dropbox folder so only when it was me using the machine the contents were available.

A quick google gave me this excellent article from Lifehacker. There's not much to add to it r

eally, it's all there.

I now have

a TrueCrypt 'volume' that I've set as a favorite, which can then be auto mounted on start-up. This volume now contains my Dropbox folder.

The nice touch is the batch script that sits waiting for the volume to be decrypted (me typing my password for it when it attempts to automount on logon) before Dropbox is started up. This need changing

slightly for Windows 8:

@echo off
rem Every second, check to see if volume is mounted
echo Waiting for volume...
:keepwaiting
ping -n 1 -w 1000 127.0.0.1 > null
if not exist E:\ goto keepwaiting
echo Volume found, starting Dropbox...
start "Dropbox" "C:\Users\[yourusername]\AppData\Roaming\Dropbox\bin\Dropbox.exe"

Just installed Windows 8? Looking for Notepad? Powershell?

Windows+R still works, so you could just run the command. Ditto Windows+E to navigate the file system and find it, but in either case that's not really what you're after is it?. You want a menu of everything installed, right?

You need the search interface. This brings up a screen

with a number of high level menu items the selected one being Apps which shows all installed programs (sorry I mean 'Apps'). From here you can select items for pinning onto your Start screen.

There's a few ways I can find

to get to search:

1. From the Start screen (Windows key) go to the bottom right corner and the new slidey out menu comes up where you can select Search.
2. Start typing on the Start screen and you begin typing into the search box
3. Hover over
   viagra pas cher

   where Start used to be and then right click (or Win+x) to select Search.

Enjoy.

There's a fire pit in there somewhere

We've been a tad busy at the Beale household recently. Mainly with the housebuild/planning permission episode (another story), deciding to buy a house instead, moving to that house (including the hilarity that ensues when moving from a smallholding with sheep, chickens and barn full of wood/tools/straw into an - admittedly relatively spacious - urban setting) and work taking every

other spare moment.

I had every intention of taking August off, or certainly be away from London, but the Olympics, a week long training course there and a new complex project to kick-off removed that option too.

ANYWAY, whilst these were all good things to be happening the lack of time has meant that I've been unable to go to the woods since the beginning of spring and that's really gone against the grain.

Well, I finally carved out some time this week and took a short visit with the kids. I was expecting the bracken to have taken over and it to all be a 'bit overgrown' but wasn't totally prepared for the paths to me impassible and us having to beat our way in with sticks through a carpet of waist high bracken.

A happy Hazel. The chicken wire stopped the rabbits nomming it.

When we got to the middle there was good news. My first coppicing attempt where

I took out well under 1/2 acre of hazel this winter seems to have been successful. 1 stool had no new growth, but it was in a sorry state to begin with, and the rest all were loving the new light and had plenty of new growth.

The floor was covered with green though I couldn't see much new tree growth but I could see plenty of other pioneer species such as bramble which will hopefully protect any new growth for the next few years until that can properly establish itself.

As you can see in the. first photo above, In the middle where our shelter is was very overgrown too.

With the new house and garden – our urban micro holding as we like to think of it – we've a lot of new projects vying for our time so whilst I do hope to try and find time to get some more coppicing done this winter the reality may be that I have to leave nature to itself this year. It certainly seems to be doing OK so far.

Finally, a quick illustration of what difference a growing season makes:

January: right after the coppicing

Early April: Bluebells

September: Loving that extra light

There's been a fair bit of press recently on the privacy issues surrounding the UK's smart meter roll-out – currently in its foundation stage (figuring out how it's actually going to work) before the official start of the roll out in 2014 – some of it is balanced, some of it less so.

The coverage all seems to reference just a handful of reports here, here and here but none of it goes into the detail of what exactly it is that the Government is proposing.

So, I figured I'd summarise it.

Firstly, it's worth pointing out that everything is up in the air. There's no law, no final decisions, just a large swathe of proposals that the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) have put forward as consultation documents; if you have insomnia then the full range of proposals can be found here.

DECC's April 2012 Data access and privacy consultation document contains 96 pages of policy suggestions and requests for comment broken out into 4 main sections:

1. Consumer access to data
2. Supplier access to data
3. Network operator access to data
4. Third party access to data

It also adds a few exceptions:

• Allow suppliers to access daily energy consumption data on an ad hoc basis, without customer consent, where the supplier has reasonable suspicion that theft is being committed, or for the purposes of accurate billing (for example, at change of tenancy/change of supplier/change of tariff
  farmacia on line

  events) and addressing customer queries;

• Allow suppliers to access half-hourly energy consumption data for use in approved trials, with clear opportunity for the consumer to opt out;
• For pre-payment customers, allow suppliers to access more regular readings as top-ups are made, provided this has been explained to the customer.

If you're skimming you can stop there, that's the main thrust, the rest of this article adds further detail chapter by chapter.

Introduction

The important point in this chapter is that the Government proposes to:

impose tighter restrictions on the collection and use of energy consumption data than the Data Protection Act would on its own.

It goes on to state that:

Personal data are defined in the Data Protection Act as “…data which relate to a living individual who can be identified from those data, or from those data and other information
which is in the possession of, or is likely to come into the possession of, the data controller”.
The Government’s view is that energy consumption data from smart meters should be considered to be personal data for the purposes of the Act. This view is supported by the Information Commissioner’s Office and Opinion 12/2011 of the Article 29 European Data Protection Working Party

So there you have it. Our consumption data will be classed as personal data and be protected under existing data protection legislation with further protection under the licencing obligations that the suppliers, network operators and third parties will

also have to adhere to (more on that later).

Consumer access to data

DECC makes clear that they feel it is important for consumers to access their own consumption data to “reduce energy consumption and save money on bills”. They also state that:

Suppliers will be required to offer domestic customers an in-home display (IHD) on installation of a smart meter. This will enable domestic consumers to see information about their energy consumption displayed in near real time.

…

There will also be requirements designed to protect the security of the smart metering system including the IHD.

Amongst some general technical stipulations they also require that:

smart meters must be capable of storing 13 months’ worth of consumption data, at half-hourly consumption intervals. SMETS [Smart Metering Technical Specification] will also require that the smart metering equipment is capable of sharing consumer information across a secure communication link to a consumer display.

.. and that it is also important to ensure that:

when people move home, there are checks in place to prevent the new resident from accessing data about the previous resident, and that when people change supplier, the new supplier is not able to access data from the period before they became the registered supplier (unless the consumer gives the new supplier permission)

Supplier access to data

Suppliers are the consumer facing energy companies that bill us for the electricity (& gas) that we use.

There's not much to add from this section after that laid out in my introduction except for these sound bites taken from the Smart Meter rollout impact assessment which:

• assumes £236 million present value benefit up to 2030 from reduced theft
  …
• estimates £820 million present value benefits from electricity demand shift due to the uptake of time-of-use tariffs
  …
• assumes significant (over £1 billion present value) benefit from improved debt handling up to 2030
  …
• assumes £4.4 billion present value domestic consumer benefits from energy saving – over a quarter of the total benefits expected from the domestic roll-out of smart meters

This also caught my eye (my emphasis):

Whilst the framework would allow suppliers to access daily energy consumption data assuming consumers did not opt out, views from stakeholders suggest that third party market participants (such as energy services companies providing energy efficiency diagnostics) are most interested in half-hourly or more granular data – for which explicit (opt-in) consent would be required by both suppliers and third parties

It's notable as it's the only place I could see in the entire 96 page document that hints at giving a consumer the opt-in ability to allow a third party access at a greater frequency.

There's then some mention of the role of the Data and Communications Company (DCC) which will be a heavily regulated “third party entity” that will adhere to a Smart Energy Code. Further discussion on how the DCC will be set-up is outside the scope of this article but there's plenty of excruciating detail here and here. In short it will control all access to smart metering data through a licencing system.

In this supplier access chapter, the key points in relation to the DCC were that:

[the DCC] will perform standard checks of parties wishing to access data from smart meters, including that they are signatories of the Smart Energy Code, and where appropriate, the registered supplier for the meter point in question. However, the DCC is not expected to play any pro-active role in determining what data suppliers can access. Instead, in submitting any access request to the DCC, suppliers would effectively be confirming (or ‘self-certifying’) to the DCC that they had the necessary permission to access the data, where this was required. Under the proposals set out above, rules about what data suppliers could access, under what conditions, would be set out in licence, and this would be regulated by Ofgem.
…
There will also be high-level obligations on the DCC to protect the physical integrity of the smart metering system and handle confidential information appropriately

Network operator access to data

Distribution Network Operators (DNO) are “companies licensed to distribute electricity in Great Britain by the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets” (Wikipedia).

They own the cables in the street and meters in our homes and lease the use of the network to licenced energy suppliers which are the companies that we get our bills from.

This short chapter states that the requirements of the DNOs in the context of access to smart metering data are different to those of suppliers. It states that DNOs (my emphasis):

• would want to be able to access half-hourly electricity and gas consumption data from all properties but that this could be aggregated to mitigate privacy concerns. Network operators might need half-hourly energy consumption data specific to each household in future, for example to manage cust
  Das Ultimative Klimmzugprogramm

  omers with electric vehicles or micro-generation, but this was not required at the current time.
  …

• expect to be able to access other types of technical data – including data on “reactive energy” (i.e. power component of electrical energy), system quality (for example, voltage levels and loss of supply data), meter events (for example, physical tamper attempts and interferences) and meter configuration – but that this technical data does not show the customer’s energy consumption data.

There is a discussion over the licencing and regulatory framework for DNOs and;

To avoid having to revisit licence conditions, if and when plans for aggregation are approved, the Government considers it appropriate to set out in licence conditions now that, subject to those plans being approved, network operators could have access to half-hourly
data.

As well as asking for feedback on the proposals and noting that aggregation technologies need further definition it sums up by saying:

The proposals described in this chapter would apply to energy consumption data accessed by network operators. However, as set out above, network operators may wish to access other technical data from smart meters (such as electricity quality or voltage readings) which does not show energy consumption data. It is proposed that technical data such as this would be outside the scope of the Government’s policy framework for data access and privacy. However, where such data constituted personal data according to the Data Protection Act, then the Data Protection Act would apply.

Third party access to data

Arguably the most important chapter in this document, it details how the term:

‘third party’ generally refers to non-licensed parties, such as energy services companies [ESCOs] and switching sites.

However, suppliers wishing to provide services to a customer for whom they are not currently the registered supplier (for example, for a tariff quote) should also be considered to be a ‘third party’. From a competition point of view, it will also be important for consumers to enable third parties to access data without the registered supplier’s involvement.

It then breaks things down under distinct headings.

Access direct from individuals

Verbatim quote:

1. If they have already accessed it themselves (through one of the routes described in Chapter 2) [Consumer access to data], consumers could send their own energy consumption data directly to third parties. For example, an individual could send their data to a third party in electronic format, having accessed it via the Home Area Network (HAN).
2. Such arrangements would be governed by contract between the consumer and third party – for example, an individual would agree to terms and conditions when signing up for a particular service – and would be outwith the smart metering regulatory regime. Third parties would be bound by relevant legislation such as the Data Protection Act. The Government does not consider it necessary or appropriate to introduce any other specific measures in respect of these transactions.
3. However, the Government is conscious that data captured via the HAN which is sent on to third parties could include more granular near real-time data, which could allow appliance-level use to be identified and which prompts the greatest privacy concerns. Whilst consumers would explicitly have to agree to the collection of this information (for example, they would need to acquire an additional device to enable this), it is important that consumers are clear about what is involved. The Government is therefore discussing this issue with manufacturers of relevant devices to encourage good practice.

This seemed sensible:

It will be important to ensure that consumers remain aware of decisions they may have made previously about who can access their data, for which purposes, where that data is being accessed on an ongoing basis. The Government therefore proposes to require third parties to provide annual reminders to consumers about the data that they are accessing, and how consumers can change the arrangements if they wish to.

As did this:

The Government will consider in due course the potential need for more stringent arrangements and checks if third parties wished to offer load control services (for example, remotely turning appliances on and off). At this stage, and until that further work is complete, third parties would not be able to offer load control services via the DCC.

The last paragraph of this chapter definitely warrants a mention:

Smart meter data potentially offers more detailed information about energy usage than had previously been available, and this may lead to increased requests for access to personal data from law enforcement agencies (such as the police). Data controllers should ensure they have procedures in place to deal with such requests and ensure appropriate safeguards are established before disclosure of data. Data controllers should take care to verify that the request is from an appropriate authority and be satisfied that the disclosure of the data is necessary for the purposes of crime prevention or detection, or the apprehension or prosecution of offenders.

Awoogah! No request for comments after it, like so many others within the document. It is written as a given and with no details as to what particular 'procedures' should be in place. As I read this the DCC can arbitrarily decide that disclosure is necessary with no stipulation as to exactly what the severity of the crime being investigated (or pre-empted) might be. This is a pretty suspect statement. Where's the detail? At best this is DECC oversight, a pretty massive one given the title of the document. We've already had big brother related headlines and this doesn't exactly go out of its way to alleviate those concerns.

Finally, the last chapter is short and covers the non-domestic sector which I've chosen to skim over for the sake of brevity.

Overall it seems pretty well thought out document but it's hard to ignore that last paragraph and how wide that law enforcement catch-all is.

So, things to keep an eye on (as it is to late to comment on this round of consultation) are:

• supplier/third party self-certification of permissive rights to data
• DNO access, exactly what they will get and how will the aggregation functions work
• could the police use the DCC data arbitrarily?

Hopefully this provides some clarity on the situation. It helped me if nothing else.