Bought any computing stuff today?

[Feanor]

Just bought a 2TB Hitachi drive to re-build my CentOS7/Roundcube webmail server.
This was a nice new Gen8 HP microserver, but I just grabbed a random HDD from the Teetering Pile o' Old HDDs to shove in it in my enthusiasm to get it up and running.

Following a power outage, the drive never properly spun up again, and the box is now dead.
The machine was only ever an experimental build, so no great loss.
But I'm already getting gripes about when will the webmail be back up.
Bugger off and use the IMAP clients I set up for you all!

Anyways, a server re-build is on the cards, and this time I'll take a disk image once it's up and running.

[Afasoas]

Following a power outage, the drive never properly spun up again, and the box is now dead.
The machine was only ever an experimental build, so no great loss.
But I'm already getting gripes about when will the webmail be back up.
Bugger off and use the IMAP clients I set up for you all!

MDADM FTW?

[Afasoas]

I upgraded the fans in both home/backup server over the weekend so hopefully they will stay cool when summer finally arrives.
When I powered on the main server, the virtualised pfSense firewall stalled booting, because it had lost one of it's interfaces. The IGB driver logged "probed wailed with error -13" for one of the ports, so I'm assuming hardware failure. If it was a driver problem, I'd expect all four ports to be effect.

I've vLANned the b0rked interface over one of the other ports for now and order 2x pre-owned Intel Pro/1000VT quad port network cards. I'm thinking eventually I might get some static public IP addresses and start running a second virtualised firewall on the backup server for redundancy.

So.. anyone want an Intel Pro/1000VT quad port gigabit network card with only 3 working ports?

[TimO]

A 200kHz single channel scope, for £16 !

I'm not expecting a great deal, the bandwidth is low, and it's a single channel with no external trigger, but it should be fun to experiment with.

[Kim]

A 200kHz single channel scope, for £16 !

I'm not expecting a great deal, the bandwidth is low, and it's a single channel with no external trigger, but it should be fun to experiment with.

That looks like an ideal basis for a lighting evilness detector for barakta.  *clicky*

[Morat]

No, it's been a quiet day.


Err no actually I bought a barcode label printer this morning. A device so exciting I'd forgotten all about it already.

[menthel]

A Dell XPS 13 2 in 1 and an XPS 15. One for me and one for my wife. Finally moving away from the doctor shunning purveyors of overly expensive and now unexciting technology. Hoping it goes well...

[Morat]

lovely machines!

[tiermat]

A Dell XPS 13 2 in 1 and an XPS 15. One for me and one for my wife. Finally moving away from the doctor shunning purveyors of overly expensive and now unexciting technology. Hoping it goes well...

Same purchase I made 6 months ago. You did get them from the outlet, didn't you?

[menthel]

A Dell XPS 13 2 in 1 and an XPS 15. One for me and one for my wife. Finally moving away from the doctor shunning purveyors of overly expensive and now unexciting technology. Hoping it goes well...

Same purchase I made 6 months ago. You did get them from the outlet, didn't you?

No, but large discounts were obtained through various methods...

[Feanor]

A Dell XPS 13 2 in 1 and an XPS 15. One for me and one for my wife. Finally moving away from the doctor shunning purveyors of overly expensive and now unexciting technology. Hoping it goes well...

Same purchase I made 6 months ago. You did get them from the outlet, didn't you?

Do you mean the Dell Outlet site?
I've used them before, some years ago.
Is it still worthwhile?

I have need of a similar purchase.

[davelodwig]

A 200kHz single channel scope, for £16 !

I'm not expecting a great deal, the bandwidth is low, and it's a single channel with no external trigger, but it should be fun to experiment with.

I was just thinking the same but I don't appear to be able to connect to the website, it would have been a little addition to my radio box.

D.

That looks like an ideal basis for a lighting evilness detector for barakta.  *clicky*

[TimO]

A 200kHz single channel scope, for £16 !

I'm not expecting a great deal, the bandwidth is low, and it's a single channel with no external trigger, but it should be fun to experiment with.

That looks like an ideal basis for a lighting evilness detector for barakta.  *clicky*

I was just thinking the same but I don't appear to be able to connect to the website, it would have been a little addition to my radio box.

BangGood is a pretty big website, if it's not working, then try again later. It's certainly working for me at the moment.

You can find the same thing on eBay, delivered direct from the UK, but it's twice the price of waiting for delivery from China, which kind of defeats the whole bargain aspect !

     JYE Tech DS0150 Digital Oscilloscope Kit

[Afasoas]

I've purchased a bargainous second hand IP enabled PDU for the rack.

This is forward planning for when I can afford a couple of switches and a couple of servers to run a lab set-up. It will be nice to switch the lab on and off remotely and keep the power bills down.

[TimO]

Another Pi Zero W, a Zero 4U USB Hub and Unicorn pHAT.



I've got fed up unmounting the Fly6 and Garmin Virb cameras from the bicycle, so that I can plug them into the NAS to charge the batteries and dump the video.

I can mount this stack of cards next to the bike, plugged into the same mains supply as I use to charge the Exposure lights.  With a little bit of bash scripting, it should be able to recognise that the devices have been plugged in, and start a transfer over the network to the NAS.  The Unicorn PHAT will allow me to display some basic status information about the devices plugged in, the networking connection, disc capacity etc.

It's always amusing that almost every extra board you buy for a Raspberry Pi Zero W, costs more than the processor board itself !

[Greenbank]

It's always amusing that almost every extra board you buy for a Raspberry Pi Zero W, costs more than the processor board itself !

Indeed.

The ZeroSeg is an excellent add-on. I made one which displays the time to the next bus that passes our house (and, at the press of a button[1], also displays the next 10 buses at the end of our road).



1. The other button on the ZeroSeg makes it display a random silly message for my daughter.

[Kim]

A 200kHz single channel scope, for £16 !

Just finished building mine (mildly irksome tiny pads on the through-hole stuff that a beginner might find challenging, it benefits from the flux pen treatment, but no real surprises).  The case is some of the cheapest nastiest self-untapping plastic rubbish you're likely to come across, but it does appear to work...



Seems to agree with the Rigol to within the sort of precision you can reasonably eyeball on such a tiny display (it doesn't do measurements).

Shame there isn't space for a 9V battery inside the case really, though it's drawing the best part of 120mA, so it wouldn't last long.

[hulver]

A 200kHz single channel scope, for £16 !

Just finished building mine (mildly irksome tiny pads on the through-hole stuff that a beginner might find challenging, it benefits from the flux pen treatment, but no real surprises).  The case is some of the cheapest nastiest self-untapping plastic rubbish you're likely to come across, but it does appear to work...



Seems to agree with the Rigol to within the sort of precision you can reasonably eyeball on such a tiny display (it doesn't do measurements).

Shame there isn't space for a 9V battery inside the case really, though it's drawing the best part of 120mA, so it wouldn't last long.

On the previous version you could hold down the OK button while the timebase was highlighted to turn a display of the values on or off. I bet this has got something similar.

Checks

http://www.jyetech.com/Products/LcdScope/UserManual_Shell.pdf

Yes, holding down the OK button for 3 seconds turns the display of values on and off. There are various "hidden" functions like that, centering waveforms, even save and recall of waveforms by pressing combinations of buttons.

[Kim]

My fault for not RTFMing.  That's even better.   

[David Martin]

I have put a bid on a slide rule. And am thinking of retail therapy and buying an antique mechanical calculator. It's to make the students feel really young and to terrify my colleagues, even though I have never used a slide rule in anger. I do have four figure log tables though

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

An inside SSD.  I aim to whip out the HD and plug the SSD into the SATA.  It's that easy, innit.

[Vince]

Yes, its that easy.
(You may need a caddy if you're replacing a 5 1/2 inch drive.)

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

SSD arrived today and took about 90 mins to clone, say 2 hours total. Physically it went straight into a 6 year old Presario CQ61 with SATA 3 altho' the first start up was wobbly.  I've done quite a few starts since and boot time is greatly reduced and it's loads faster doing everything.  Runs very much cooler too.  Money well spent. 

[Afasoas]

Now't special. Just three quality pre-loved SFX power supplies at a bargain £9 a piece. Two to use in my servers, one to keep as a spare (..they are second hand!)

When I rebuilt the main/backup servers into rack cases, the ATX PSUs were a tight fit and consequently I broke the SATA connector on one of the hard disks.
Said disk still works, but at some point I'll replace it just to be on the safe side.

I'm eyeing up some cheapish SSDs so that I can have mdadm RAIDed boot disks. Not rich enough to justify it yet, but as I've once lost the home network thanks to a dead SSD it needs doing.

[Kim]

Disks.