Author Topic: Fettled any computer stuff today?  (Read 214246 times)

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1225 on: 19 November, 2020, 08:38:31 am »
Putting a new 4TB drive in the ESXi box. First time I'd opened it up for about 6 years.

(click to show/hide)

It worked first time, and I didn't break anything else!



The 4TB drive is to help me consolidate all of my old HDDs, deduplicate the data, throw away everything I don't need, and then give me one thing I need to backup.
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1226 on: 21 November, 2020, 11:40:53 am »
The Great Sort Out (TM) continues:-

Returned old work mobile as I got an replacement/upgrade.

Returned crap "Apple certified" iPhone headphones to Amazon. Ordered some genuine Apple ones. (The ones with a lightning connector that allow the microphone to work too, all of the adapters just do headphones and not the mic.)

Sent off old personal iPhone (which I think I bought from ChrisN or AWL 2 years ago, it's done well!) to Apple to get a replacement battery, it might be going to MiniGB as she's starting secondary school next year, if not I'll sell it.

Changed SIM deal with EE. 8 times as much data for £2/month less, plus it gives me 5G.

Got Raspberry Pi 4 out and setup, using it to copy old HDD images off onto the server (hence the 4TB drive install above) for the big data consolidation exercise.

Once I've copied the drive from my old Quad PowerMac G5 I can wipe it and put the whole thing on eBay.

Then I've got 4 2.5" HDDs on my desk, and another 4 in my office desk drawer (which I can't get for a few more weeks).
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

Afasoas

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1227 on: 21 November, 2020, 11:36:50 pm »
Put together the new budget silent PC ... I forget how cathartic PC building can be when everything fits together and there's ample time to do it.



Sadly the CPU I ordered has not arrived in stock yet. It can't come soon enough as the fan noise from the older desktop is causing a degree of tinnitus.

Pingu

  • Put away those fiery biscuits!
  • Mrs Pingu's domestique
    • the Igloo
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1228 on: 21 November, 2020, 11:40:17 pm »
Put together the new budget silent PC ...

OOI, what's the spec?

Afasoas

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1229 on: 22 November, 2020, 03:36:06 pm »
Put together the new budget silent PC ...

OOI, what's the spec?

Nothing fancy.
It has an Asus B450M-HDV R4.0 motherboard, which demonstrates its budget credentials with only two RAM slots. 8 GB of DDR4-2666, and when it arrives, an AMD Athlon 3000G CPU (Ryzen's low end sibbling).
The CPU cooler is a Noctua NH-U12S, which is quite tall. The case is a Cosair Carbide 270R - the cheapest one wide enough to accommodate that cooler without side windows or RGB.

All in, that has cost a hair over £250.

The Noctua case fans I've had in a drawer for the last 2-3 years waiting for the day I built a quiet desktop. I can't quite believe how pricey they are now!
I've re-purposed a 64GB SSD from a Celeron N2807 Brix that I used to use as my desktop.

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1230 on: 22 December, 2020, 11:59:47 pm »
I have a PowerBook G4 that I run some cron scripts on. It's probably the only one in the world (i) still in operation and (ii) with a bona fide PATA IDE SSD (iii) a battery that still sort of holds charge.

For the last couple of years it's been powered by a dodgy third party cable badly soldered to a much newer Macbook charger* which had lost its cable in a tragic chair leg accident.

Despite it living mostly undisturbed in a drawer, a month (or two) back I managed to break the centre pin off the proprietary power connecter and it's been sitting dead, its cron tasks undone.

Today I started looking on ebay, discovered both genuine secondhand and newer fake chargers are approaching scarcity and gritted my teeth for which type of dodginess I would be spending money on.

But before that, I had one last rummage in my junk box* and found a mint condition genuine Apple Powerbook charger. Tis a Winterval miracle.

(* ok, one of my many, many junkboxes)

ETA: (** Just noticed this is not an Apple "Magsafe 2 Power Adapter" like I thought but a genuine "Replacement 2 Power Adapter" with no copyright infringement intended)

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1231 on: 06 January, 2021, 06:04:31 pm »
Ordered a certified HDMI 2.0 cable a few days ago as the original cable (just a random one I had lying around) I'd used to connect my new laptop to the 4K monitor was only giving me 4K @ 30Hz and not 4K @ 60Hz.

My work laptop does 4K @ 60Hz on this monitor but that's because it uses a USB-C to Display Port cable. My new (personal) laptop has an HDMI socket and the USB-C port can't be used for displays.

New cable arrived and I moved the monitor out to plug it in, at which point I notice that, of the 3 HDMI ports on the back of the monitor, only one (HDMI1) is marked "4K 60p". Guess what isn't plugged into this port. The existing random HDMI cable is currently plugged in to HDMI3.

Moving the same cable to HDMI1 and the laptop can now do 4K@60Hz. I'd just assumed that it was the random cable that wasn't up to scratch.

Not a huge biggie, an HDMI 2.0 cable won't go to waste if I ever upgrade our TV to 4K and something doesn't like one of the existing cables.

Speaking of which, need to buy a CD/DVD burner as the only ones we have in the house now are (a) an 8 year old laptop that is on its way out, (b) my work laptop which I shouldn't be using for things like this. The other two laptops in the house are the 'ultra-thin' style with no optical drive at all.

It'd also be useful to use it to play DVDs as we don't have a standalone DVD player (we've just used a laptop hooked up to the telly on the rare occasion we want to do this).

This big 4K monitor also does Picture-In-Picture so I can have the footy on on my personal laptop in one quarter of the screen whilst my work laptop is completely unaware that this going on.
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

Gattopardo

  • Lord of the sith
  • Overseaing the building of the death star
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1232 on: 08 January, 2021, 01:43:10 pm »
Trying to reinstall a win 10 32bit on a little laptop.  Downloaded the official win10 iso and it is corrupted according to the install from USB drive.

Why does it have to be so not straight forward?

Gattopardo

  • Lord of the sith
  • Overseaing the building of the death star
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1233 on: 08 January, 2021, 03:11:05 pm »
Oh now here is one for some to figure out, what ever USB stick or install of windows is used the fail is the same the program goes in to recovery your pc device needs to repaired.  The header checksum for this file doesnt matched the computed checksum




Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1234 on: 08 January, 2021, 05:18:12 pm »
Last sunday my ubiquity nano lost connection across the road and had to be power cycled to get the stream working again.
I think the problem may have been that whilst there was a clear line of site, a high sided van on the road could have cut it off.

So today I moved the devices to new sites.  The one on the church meant getting a friend to hold the ladder for me and running the cable further.  The other one needed the wall drilling and about 5 metres of cat 6 cable installing and terminating.  All now working with 5bars of signal.  I am streaming privately to my facebook page the BBC news headline page so that i can check the stream for the next few hours.

Gattopardo

  • Lord of the sith
  • Overseaing the building of the death star
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1235 on: 08 January, 2021, 07:36:50 pm »
Why won't any version of windows instal on the machine now!

What the fuck am I doing wrong?

Kim

  • Timelord
    • Fediverse
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1236 on: 09 January, 2021, 12:19:39 am »
Attracting sharks.  We've all been there.

tiermat

  • According to Jane, I'm a Unisex SpaceAdmin
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1237 on: 15 January, 2021, 11:33:35 am »
Re-imaging the 5 SD cards that are used in my Raspberry PI K8s cluster, as I am switching to K3s (k8s too heavyweight for what I want to do and for Pi 3)
I feel like Captain Kirk, on a brand new planet every day, a little like King Kong on top of the Empire State

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1238 on: 15 January, 2021, 12:59:50 pm »
Fun with BGP and MPLS L3VPN today in my home lab.
All working.

Now I have to attach some Cisco FTD firewalls to it and model failover times across the whole setup.
I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

Afasoas

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1239 on: 23 January, 2021, 05:51:49 pm »
Fun with BGP and MPLS L3VPN today in my home lab.
All working.

Now I have to attach some Cisco FTD firewalls to it and model failover times across the whole setup.

Sounds more fun than making traffic shaping actually work with HSFC :)
Got there in the end though.

tiermat

  • According to Jane, I'm a Unisex SpaceAdmin
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1240 on: 23 January, 2021, 06:27:54 pm »
Re-imaging the 5 SD cards that are used in my Raspberry PI K8s cluster, as I am switching to K3s (k8s too heavyweight for what I want to do and for Pi 3)

Update on this. If trying this, replace the master with a Pi 4/4gb. Keep the 3B+ Pis as nodes and all is good.
I feel like Captain Kirk, on a brand new planet every day, a little like King Kong on top of the Empire State

tiermat

  • According to Jane, I'm a Unisex SpaceAdmin
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1241 on: 27 January, 2021, 01:01:34 pm »
Spent the day (duvet day) configuring Grafana and Loki on the cluster
I feel like Captain Kirk, on a brand new planet every day, a little like King Kong on top of the Empire State

T42

  • Apprentice geezer
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1242 on: 03 February, 2021, 01:45:50 pm »
Successfully resurrected MrsT's old work XP box so that I could fettle my cycling log prog. Quite nippy once I removed all the cruft and reduced C: occupancy from 95% to 60%.  Only trouble is the loud head-filling hum it makes. 193 Hz according to sound spectrum app on my phone.
I've dusted off all those old bottles and set them up straight

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1243 on: 03 February, 2021, 10:46:23 pm »
Not sure if you would class my elderly Humax Freesat receiver/recorder as a computer (though it does have Linux under the bonnet).

Anyway I finally got round to earning some brownie points with the wife by replacing the apparently annoying (to her) trailing Cat 5 cable that enabled it to talk to my router with a Vonets wifi dongle (having tried, and failed, to work out if I could use one of my growing collection of superseded BT hubs as a bridge).

Happily no Linux drivers were required - the dongle just plugs into the RJ45 and does its magic stuff, with the Freesat box being none the wiser.  The dongle did, however, need to be plugged into an ancient laptop (none of my newer ones have an Ethernet jack) so that I could configure the SSID and password for the router.

Job done, now I can change channel, set recordings, etc from my laptop.  More to the point, I can now play my recordings on the PC while the TV is being used by SWMBO for important stuff like Midsomer Murders and Poirot.   :)

T42

  • Apprentice geezer
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1244 on: 04 February, 2021, 08:50:15 am »
MrsT's old XP box told me this morning that our ISDN connection was inactive. Oh dear.

Tell you what's dumb, though: it has two USB ports on the front.  To get at them you have to lift a 10 cm long flap then couch down on the floor  with a torch and your head on the carpet to get a stick in, since they're slanted downwards in the dark at about 70° to the horizontal.  And it appears that only one of them works, and it won't take a stick longer than 4 cm or else it fouls the housing - Dell at their Dellmost.  So to transfer stuff across (box is not even getting a sniff of our network) I have to dive under the desk with same torch and poke stick in round the back.

The great thing is that without a firewall, antivirus and a dozen bits of rubbish running in the background the thing is actually fast. But then so was the 486 I did development on in 1994.
I've dusted off all those old bottles and set them up straight

tiermat

  • According to Jane, I'm a Unisex SpaceAdmin
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1245 on: 09 February, 2021, 11:52:07 am »
Great fun cleaning up Slack, or specifically DMs therein. 'Cos reasons.
I feel like Captain Kirk, on a brand new planet every day, a little like King Kong on top of the Empire State

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1246 on: 10 February, 2021, 08:35:31 pm »
Latest in a continuing series of attempts to stop W10 on my laptop from freezing for 30 seconds or more (sometimes much longer) at random intervals.

Event Viewer helpfully informing me that a "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued", so trying the usual power-plan-related tweaks.

Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1247 on: 10 February, 2021, 09:49:42 pm »
Added an ANT+ USB dongle to my Mac and Zwift and Tacx setup, and managed to get my Garmin HRM working with it. Yay!
It is simpler than it looks.

tiermat

  • According to Jane, I'm a Unisex SpaceAdmin
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1248 on: 23 February, 2021, 10:53:43 am »
Fixed a really annoying issue with AWS Lambda, Node and postgres.

Only took me 2 days, there are people in the company that could have fixed it quicker, but aren't allowed to. Oh well
I feel like Captain Kirk, on a brand new planet every day, a little like King Kong on top of the Empire State

CommuteTooFar

  • Inadequate Randonneur
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #1249 on: 28 February, 2021, 12:37:45 am »
On Friday morning an inept Openreach engineer disconnected my phone line and internet connection. I phoned the first the number the bt homehub gives you with its insane if you have as problem with your internet look for a solution on our website. I found a better number in the phone book and was answered by a helpful lady from BT Dublin who tested my line found a fault. A phone had come back but my internet was still unavailable.  She said a engineer would look at it next week, meanwhile she would send me a 4g to wifi mini home hub. 

Today I hear someone outside my front door and I find another more competent Openreach engineer.  "Your internet is working now".  I go to my computer, run a speedtest and I am getting BT fibre 2 speeds.  My phone rings and someone asks who I am. She rung her phone with her mobile and got me.  I see the engineer across the road I tell him I have the wrong line.  He said a real mess has been made of the junction box five other people have phone and internet problems in my twenty house street. He is trying to get my proper line sorted. At that moment a DPD driver turns up with the mini hub.  So I set up the mini hub. It worked. Before I could test it the computer had downloaded video card updates. A knock on the door. "Your line is right now."  I phone my number with my mobile. It rings.  I do a speedtest and I get Fibre 1 speeds (its what I pay for).

More fettling required the nice Dublin lady asked me to factory reset my homehub. Which trashed all my wifi choices so that needed to be reapplied. The minihub is back in its box ready for my next Openreach adventure.