Fettled any computer stuff today?

[SoreTween]

It also appears to be borking my PowerLine kit. It uses powerline comms to communicate with the microinverters and separate 1901 systems are supposed to co exist.  The evidence suggests they don't.  Worst case I'll have to move the solar kit to a separate consumer unit and fit chokes to keep it out of the main board which would be a right PITA.

I was wrong, the controller to microinverter traffic is not ISO1901, its a much lower frequency band.  Also, further testing reveals comms to Mrs Tween's barn (on the Iso1901 powerline devices) is perfectly adept at falling on it's arse with the solar kit all off.  Next theory, it's the power saving in the powerline adapters switching 'em off.  They only wake up in response to whiffy traffic of which there's none when the link is down, the remote end pi is polled only other than it's midnight backup job.  I now have a 10s interval ping running, lets see how long that lasts.

[Tim Hall]

After slavishly following a few YouTube guides plus a modicum of frantic googling, I've got a QEMU/KVM virtual machine running W7.

[pcolbeck]

Fun day of eBGP combined with tracing packets in and out of dual datacentre VXLAN EVPN fabrics.
Surprisingly after all the crap that's gone on with this job over the last few weeks it all worked exactly as it should.

[Afasoas]

Fun day of eBGP combined with tracing packets in and out of dual datacentre VXLAN EVPN fabrics.
Surprisingly after all the crap that's gone on with this job over the last few weeks it all worked exactly as it should.

 
The rare days on which something just works, especially when said something involves several moving parts, are to be savoured.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

Been running Zwift off the iPad and thinking a bigger picture would be nice I bought a connector off ebay.  Apple were selling them for £49.99 which seemed expensive for a simple(?) interconnect and there are dozens of cheapos on ebay.

Of course I could not get it to work and contacted the seller.  Following their advice (including an Apple video link) I could only get the ebay one to work once after much jiggery-pokery.  After that the monitor refused to talk to it. Totally.  Then I found ebay had withdrawn the item and I can't even leave feedback!  I await their refund with low expectations.

Now I have bought the Apple version.  No prizes for guessing which:
 


The Apple one works straight out of the carefully sealed box with a lovely picture albeit slightly wrong aspect ratio at the moment.   I guess there is more to these connectors than I realised.

[Kim]

I guess there is more to these connectors than I realised.

It's an entire video card in a dongle, isn't it?

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

I guess there is more to these connectors than I realised.

It's an entire video card in a dongle, isn't it?

 video card is probably the issue.  Maybe if I had bought the Maplin version it'd have worked.

I also tried hooking up the tennis (Amazon Prime) to the monitor with a 2018 firestick for Mrs A and it worked ok but when I ditched the firestick for a laptop the picture was a lot clearer.  The monitor has fast response and refresh rates so is good for things like tennis. 

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

I guess there is more to these connectors than I realised.

It's an entire video card in a dongle, isn't it?

 video card is probably the issue.  Maybe if I had bought the Maplin version it'd have worked.

I also tried hooking up the tennis (Amazon Prime) to the monitor with a 2018 firestick for Mrs A and it worked ok but when I ditched the firestick for a laptop the picture was a lot clearer.  The monitor has fast response and refresh rates so is good for things like tennis. 

Chipset specifications[edit]
The Allwinner SoC family includes A-series, which is intended for Android OS, and F-series, which is intended for the company's self-developed Melis operating system.

The A-Series, including the A10, A20 and A31 SoCs, have a proprietary in-house designed multimedia co-processing DSP (Digital Signal Processing) processor technology for hardware accelerated video, image, and audio decoding, called CedarX (with subprocessing called "CedarV" for video decoding and "CedarA" for audio decoding), able to decode 2160p 2D and 1080p 3D video. The main disadvantages with CedarX technology and associated libraries is that Allwinner's own CedarX proprietary libraries have no clear usage license, so even if the source code for some versions is available the terms-of-use is unknown in open source software, and there is no glue code for any other multimedia frameworks on GNU/Linux systems that could be used as a middle-ware, like for example OpenMAX or VAAPI.
..

Allwinner has also been accused of including a backdoor in its published version of the Linux kernel.[71][72] The backdoor allows any installed app to have full root access to the system. While this may be a remnant of debugging during the development process, it presents a significant security risk to all devices using the Allwinner provided kernel.

[Greenbank]

Ordered a bunch of stuff:-

* a spare 1TB drive for the NAS (don't want to wait for delivery if one decides to fail - of course this means two will now fail).
* a 4TB drive for the ESXi box. It'll be used to help consolidate all of my old HDD data. I've got 8 old laptop HDDs[1]
* an 8 port switch to be attached to the underside of the desk
* a bunch of short network cables (mostly for future recabling but also to help my SiL+BiL get their DSL connection in the right place rather than precariously balanced on top of an electrical cupboard)

1. Three from random old laptops but five of them are from my work laptop. When I get a new work laptop I tend to take the drive out of the old one to act as a backup. Apart from having too much personal stuff on my work laptop (plan is to move that to 0 with a new personal laptop purchase in the new year) but until then I want to cut down on the amount of crap (and copies of it) I have.

I've done the bulk of the 3.5" HDDs this week, 5 wiped and ready to go to the tip, just have one left in the old linux box I'm using to recover old stuff, and one that's been sent to a data recovery company (should hear back on the latest on that tomorrow).

[Chris S]

Fixed failed HDD on NAS (Heads-up, Greenbank! )

Man, I love RAID; no dramas, HDD replaced, integrity restored.

[Greenbank]

Ha. It's great when it works...

On my list of things to do:-
* Get images of each of the old HDDs (some are locked in a drawer in the office so they can wait a while) onto new 4TB drive
* Write a script to flag and then delete duplicate copies of files
* Consolidate all of my personal data
* Organise all of the photos
* Back it up properly (once on the NAS, then take a copy of that on an external HDD)
* Also setup backup area for Mrs GB
* Setup online backup from the NAS to S3/Glacier
* Move all current projects into github repos
* Sell Quad Core PowerMac G5 on eBay

By end of November:
* Get a new monitor (see other threads) for home office setup
* Sell old monitors and clamp once I've decided new setup works
* Get a Flexispot EC1 sit/stand desk setup

December:
* Get a personal laptop and move all personal stuff (including browsing) off work laptop (new monitor has Picture-In-Picture which will be useful)
* AoC 2020
* Start to sort out the Dallas 1-wire stuff for temp/humidity/heating monitoring in the flat - using old Alarm wiring to centralise some of it

[StuAff]

* Sell Quad Core PowerMac G5 on eBay

A Quad. Ooh, nice. Quite a beast in its day, as short as that was, being the last hurrah of the PowerPC line. Still got its replacement (2.66 quad Mac Pro 1,1) here.

[Greenbank]

* Sell Quad Core PowerMac G5 on eBay

A Quad. Ooh, nice. Quite a beast in its day, as short as that was, being the last hurrah of the PowerPC line. Still got its replacement (2.66 quad Mac Pro 1,1) here.

At the time I was helping out port some code to the 64-bit PowerPC 970 and, more importantly, I was a bit flush and so I splurged out. It did a healthy service as a home desktop machine too although it was a noisy beast when all 4 cores were being pegged.

They still go for a reasonable amount on eBay so I can get back some of my original outlay, better than it going to the tip...

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

Been running Zwift off the iPad and thinking a bigger picture would be nice I bought a connector off ebay.  Apple were selling them for £49.99 which seemed expensive for a simple(?) interconnect and there are dozens of cheapos on ebay.

Of course I could not get it to work and contacted the seller.  Following their advice (including an Apple video link) I could only get the ebay one to work once after much jiggery-pokery.  After that the monitor refused to talk to it. Totally.  Then I found ebay had withdrawn the item and I can't even leave feedback!  I await their refund with low expectations.

Now I have bought the Apple version.  No prizes for guessing which:
 


The Apple one works straight out of the carefully sealed box with a lovely picture albeit slightly wrong aspect ratio at the moment.   I guess there is more to these connectors than I realised.

Expectations confounded!  The seller has given me a refund!  Luckily they don't want me to send it back..

[Afasoas]

I wanted a small form factor PC with dual digital display outputs to drive a pair of monitors displaying status information, when I'm working.
I'm astounded that I could buy a new one that would do the job for not far north of £300, yet anything fitting my criteria on that popular auction website was still at 1/2 that price from dubious sellers and at least 2/3rds if you include 8GB of RAM and an SSD, even though we're talking 3rd and 4th gen Core i5.

I've got an i7-3770 desktop PC I seldom use - I turn it on when I'm having to help someone with a Windows issue (everything else is running Linux), or for very occasional photo editing. It's gotten a bit noisy with old age. I took a rummage through the bits box and I happen to have a BeQuiet "Silent" PSU and four 120mm Noctua fans. So I bought a new Noctua CPU cooler, a dirty cheap ATX case with room for all the fans and passively cooled graphics adapter. It all seems a bit excessive for the job it has got to do, but it was the only way I could stay in the budget I'd allowed myself for improving my WFH setup. I'm hoping it doesn't turn out to be too power hungry.

[Greenbank]

I wanted a small form factor PC with dual digital display outputs to drive a pair of monitors displaying status information, when I'm working.

I would have spent £60 or so for a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM that can drive dual 4K displays.

[FifeingEejit]

Cleaned my keyboard.
I've rediscovered that the main body is midnight blue rather than black.

[Afasoas]

I wanted a small form factor PC with dual digital display outputs to drive a pair of monitors displaying status information, when I'm working.

I would have spent £60 or so for a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM that can drive dual 4K displays.

I honestly don't think a Pi will cut it. One page renders about 16 graphs/charts which are constantly refreshed. The other shows the current status of the development pipeline from a web application that serves as a test bed for front end developers. So that means it opens a web socket and pulls down jigglebytes of data before deciding what to render, and then renders it with lots of animation. (It is that bad we're now trialling live streaming it to reduce VPN bandwidth utilisation).

[SoreTween]

Replaced the 2 Enermax batwing 120mm fans in my desktop, despite being set to 500rpm they were still a bit noisy.  Instead it now has Noctua Redux P-12 900 rpm which are to my hearing utterly silent.

Swapped out the 95W quad CPU for an equivalent spec 65W later stepping.  That required a BIOS update which produced an excess of sweaty bum time as it repeatedly refused to boot.  Found where the reset jumper is hidden eventually.   In replacing the CPU I broke the cooler    The only spare I had was a drunk purchased water cooler (Liqmax II since you asked), a bit of a faff to fit which is why it has sat on the shelf a couple of years.  Mostly it is worth the hassle, it is totally silent.  However, having no fan on the CPU resulted in a very hot northbridge so the fan off the broken cooler is now wedged in blowing at that.  The goal here was to reduce the 95W quiescent draw, it is now 80W 
Bad news is firefox tabs keep crashing, I may have to go back to the 95W CPU 

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

After 2 years found the receiver for my wireless keyboard.  Just in time, all the useful keys on my laptop are fading into oblivion.  It's so nice to use a decent keyboard again..

[SoreTween]

More squeaky bum time :-(  The desktop kept crashing through the day, firefox tabs, firefox entire, user session (whatever that's called?  I just got dumped back to the login screen), and a total lockup.  So I put the 95W CPU back and... Linux would not boot.  So to access timeshift I popped in a live CD and that wouldn't boot either, just endlessly sat there thinking.  Win7 booted OK so I used that to get the original BIOS version, flashed that, reset BIOS and DMI one more time and all seems well now.

Oh well, I'm back at 95W quiescent.  Bum.

[Afasoas]

Reassembled my old desktop, having discovered its proprietary nature. Will hopefully get it listed on eBay this weekend. The funds raised should cover the cost of a new motherboard/CPU/memory. The whole debacle does have one advantage, in the new machine will be less power hungry.

[SoreTween]

Thanks to aiden.f I have a VPN solution that I have some level of confidence will allow me to watch the full range of Netflix & Amazon content during my next stint of incarceration working in abroad.  This seemed like a more likely solution than working through the huge list of NordVPN servers hoping to find one not yet blocked.

I've set up pivpn   There were some gotchas along the way but I've muddled through.  I can now connect my GL.iNet Slate travel router to a pi4 sitting on it's own in a VLAN.  To test it I tethered the GL.iNet to my phone, another cool feature of this really very good little router.  Along the way I learned:

• more nmap commands - wireguard is UDP whereas nmap defaults to TCP
• where nmap keeps it's list of known services and how to add a new one (nmap doesn't know wireguard)
• where nmap keeps it's list of known vendors and how to add a new one (nmap doesn't know the new rPi trading ltd co)

That got me to the point the GL.iNet could connect to pivpn but no traffic flowed.  Following this rather good video confirmed I'd set up pivpn correctly and gave me a clue what was wrong, I needed iptables entries.  The needed entries are in the video but do not work as shown.

• There's two ipv4 entries needed shown on one line, that doesn't work so i put them on separate lines in helper scripts.
• The MASQUERADE entry does not work using the short form -A & -j switches, that command need to be converted to the longer format --append  & --jump.  Wierd.

I don't claim to fully understand the iptables entries but I get enough it seems to get them working.

Go me.  I might even add a Dismal+ subscription and watch the Marvel films.  A couple I've not seen, several I've only seen on seat back postage stamp and most I've only seen in countries where they get cut to shreds censored.

[StuAff]

Yesterday, installed Big Sur on my Mac Pro 5,1 with the aid of hacks and workarounds as it's unsupported. Separate disk with nothing shared with the Mojave drives (I boot from an SSD but have the user folder on an HD, because 2TB of files). Looks pretty, works nicely. But today I noticed an anomaly- the (different) hack to get AMD GPU acceleration for video encoding/decoding on the Mojave SSD is no longer working. It's working on the Big Sur install though (the hacks for Big Sur, involving doing a bootable USB stick with OpenCore on it, also sorts that). So, go through the acceleration hack install procedure again. Not worky. Uninstall and reinstall. Not worky. Boot onto Mojave HD. Worky. Ah....clone HD (minus User folder) back to SSD. Boot with aforementioned USB stick in place, worky. Phew.

As there isn't a GPS fettling thread: new battery, second replacement, in Garmin Edge 705. The thing's somewhat battered- a couple of buttons perished/lost so repaired with patches and tape, more tape on the SD card cover I've nearly lost on account of it being loose, it's been dropped multiple times, etc…but still working.

[Afasoas]

I wanted a small form factor PC with dual digital display outputs to drive a pair of monitors displaying status information, when I'm working.

I would have spent £60 or so for a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM that can drive dual 4K displays.

I honestly don't think a Pi will cut it. One page renders about 16 graphs/charts which are constantly refreshed. The other shows the current status of the development pipeline from a web application that serves as a test bed for front end developers. So that means it opens a web socket and pulls down jigglebytes of data before deciding what to render, and then renders it with lots of animation. (It is that bad we're now trialling live streaming it to reduce VPN bandwidth utilisation).

This is said selection of browser apps running, on a quad core i5.