Bought any computing stuff today?

[Afasoas]

My rule of thumb is that if you want a quiet server, you've got to mantle it from parts that don't have 'server' written on them and sacrifice the space efficiency.

Absolutely.
Workstation motherboard here, Xeon 'L' CPU (17W TDP) and 5 'quiet' Fans spinning at around 400 rpm.

[Feanor]

Here at Feanor Towers, I now have a pair of HP Microservers handling all of my servering needs. They are silent, but somewhat under-powered, but they are not heavily loaded.
Oh, and one old dell box which is the Asterisk box.
They all run headless.

Hmm, they could do with a blast with the compressed air gun.
And yes, you can see their IP addresses.   They are published in DNS and not a secret.  Pls not to be hammering my firewall just for LOLZ


20160927_180542 by Ron Lowe, on Flickr

[ian]

I confess I couldn't go back to noisy computers. The loudest thing on my desk is the occasional lonely chirrup of a back-up drive waking up. For laffs I fired up my old G4 PowerMac the other week. That's not a fan, it's a fucking scramjet.

On the downside, my iMac does nothing to warm my office.

[Wombat]

I'm not sure why any semi-decent graphics card won't drive 4k, it's not really speed, it's bandwidth. A fairly middle-of-road Radeon in my iMac drives my 5k and a second 1920x1200 panel.

In silence. I think there's a fan. I've never actually heard it.

Nor me, but all of my hours of looking at specs of graphics cards has resulted in absolutely no silent ones, and anything that has 4k and displayport connection seems to be well into loony gamer territory.  They then proudly announce they can run 4 4K displays.  Christ, its a struggle to pay for one of the damn things, I'm not spending £2k on monitors!  Yes, I know you can get cheaper 4K monitors than that, but I want an IPS panel, and decent colour accuracy. 

My silent PC has 3 case fans (120mm) which only spin up when it starts, and then amble along totally silently, as well as the power supply fan (also huge and slow) and the processor fan.  The onboard graphics will drive a 4k monitor, and unless I have performance issues, I'll leave it that way when I get said monitor.  I just wanted to be prepared to buy a "decent" graphics card if required, but choosing was rather more difficult than I imagined.

[ian]

Unless you need a GPU that can handle the kind of acceleration that the latest games require or you're into proper animation and rendering, pretty much any graphics chip and a couple of GB memory, even integrated, should handle multiple 4k screens. They passed the threshold for driving even the highest resolution 2D displays some time back. Bandwidth is the main issue, for this retina 5k screen Apple have to bundle two entire displayport channels.

[TimC]

Current generation (and, I think, the last generation) Intel CPUs with integrated graphics can run multiple 4K 60hz displays provided sufficient displayports are available. No need for a separate GPU. If your current setup doesn't have 4K compatible integrated graphics, there are plenty of cheap graphics cards available that will do the job.

[Mr Larrington]

I didn't buy this:



(MSI Interceptor DS200 gaming mouse) because I won it for my Mega-Global Big River Corporation of Seattle, USAnia review of an MSI graphics card.  No-one has yet reviewed this product for the Mega-Global Big River Corporation of Seattle, USAnia.  I sense a business opportunity

As a confirmed trackball user I am sceptical and rather wish they'd rewarded me with a keyboard, but hey, it was in return for thirty seconds "work".

[Kim]

This raises a several of questions.  Not least, why anyone would consider Megatron's head as a model for ergonomic design.

[Dibdib]

I'm more surprised to see a gaming mouse which isn't a completely useless shape for left-handers. I bet all the l33t extra "gaming" buttons are on the wrong side, though.

[Mr Larrington]

It has the ushual complement of two big 'uns on the top plus the scroll wheel and two small buttons in the middle, and a bigger button under the forefinger of a right-handed user.  And yes, the three other l33t 9@m3rz' buttons are under your right thumb.  It's probably usable by a Sinister but it's deffo shaped for a rightie.

I'm just about to try it, so put the fire brigade on standby to rescue me from under the desk if I get stuck.

[Greenbank]

Spinning rust HDDs? Looking for a couple of 2TB drives for my server. Any particular brands to go for, any brands to avoid?

[Afasoas]

Avoid Seagate.
HGST are good.
WD Red/NAS friendly disks are, I feel, a bit of a con if you are using software raid.
Buy them from two different vendors or at different times so you don't get disks from the same batch, thus more likely to fail at the same time.
And generally, I buy cheaper/more - both my main and backup server are RAID1

[Woofage]

Avoid Seagate.
HGST are good.
WD Red/NAS friendly disks are, I feel, a bit of a con if you are using software raid.
Buy them from two different vendors or at different times so you don't get disks from the same batch, thus more likely to fail at the same time.
And generally, I buy cheaper/more - both my main and backup server are RAID1

On a related note, I consider it sensible to swap out RAID drives as a matter of course after N years. The question is, what's a sensible value for N?

[Greenbank]

Good points about different vendors and batches. I've suffered from bad batches of drives at work, thankfully I don't have to deal with that any more...

Code: [Select]

$ df -g .
Filesystem    GB blocks      Free %Used    Iused %Iused Mounted on
/dev/[CENSORED]   353836.90 104281.90   71% 278788938    80% /[CENSORED]

The joys of a single 345TB filesystem...anyway...

At home though, I don't use RAID on my backup server as it is a VM running on an ESXi box, so I can't do hardware RAID (at the VM level, and don't want to trust it at the Hypervisor level). As the data is backed up elsewhere too I've opted for simple zfs mirroring instead of software RAID.

Code: [Select]

root@backup01:/# zpool list
NAME     SIZE  ALLOC   FREE    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
backup  1016G   966G  50.2G    95%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
root@backup01:/# zpool status
  pool: backup
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        backup      ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            sdb     ONLINE       0     0     0
            sdc     ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

The ESXi box currently has 32GB RAM, 2x128GB SDD and 2x2TB HDD and I've portioned off a 1TB chunk on each HDD that's visible to my backup VM which sees them as whole drives which zfs is consuming. As you can see the zpool is 95% full.

I've only got one spare SATA port on the motherboard (unless I disconnect the DVD drive) so I was going to add in the new 2TB drive and shuffle stuff around so I use the whole of the 2 of the 2TB drives as mirrors, leaving one 2TB free for other VM images.

Options for lots of storage (my brother and I are going to be each other's offsite backup using rsync...) are:-

1) Get 3 x 4TB drives and use these to replace the existing 2 x 2TB drives. The old 2TB drives I can then use as offsite backups for important stuff by taking one in to work every month and bringing the old one home. This gives me 6TB of mirrored storage.

2) Find a 4 port 6Gbps SATA controller that works well with the free version of ESXi I'm running so I can add more drives as required, there's space for 2 more 3.5" drives in the designated bays and then I've got 2x5.25" bays free that could fit another 3 HDDs. An 8 port controller might future proof it, especially if I want to add more SDDs.

3) Move the bulk backup storage to a separate HP Microserver and get 4x3TB drives for that and do RAID. This leaves the 2x2TB drives free for VMs (mostly my pet projects).

Hmm. Decisions. I'm leaning mostly towards #2 as it keeps everything in one box and costs about the same as #3.

[Greenbank]

On a related note, I consider it sensible to swap out RAID drives as a matter of course after N years. The question is, what's a sensible value for N?

3 years if you've got the money for it, but it depends on usage and number of power cycles. That's partly why I'm looking at doing this as the two 2TB drives in my ESXi box will be 3 years old in February.

I used to grab the SMART data from all the drives every 15 minutes but the scripts that used to do that (it's not so straight forward from ESXi) stopped working and fixing them has been on my TODO list for years.

[Pickled Onion]

On a related note, I consider it sensible to swap out RAID drives as a matter of course after N years. The question is, what's a sensible value for N?

Surely the point of RAID1 is you don't need to worry about swapping a drive out until it fails and the controller sends you an email?

[Kim]

On a related note, I consider it sensible to swap out RAID drives as a matter of course after N years. The question is, what's a sensible value for N?

Surely the point of RAID1 is you don't need to worry about swapping a drive out until it fails and the controller sends you an email?

Quite.  I'd only swap them before this point if I needed more space or if was rebuilding the system and it was a convenient time to replace the disks.  If they run at a sensible temperature and you never power them down, they can keep going for ages.

Once they're out of warranty and the SMART starts chuntering you're at the other end of the bathtub curve and it's important not to take the piss.

[matthew]

Replacement power block for my netbook. The wire gave up this morning with a flash and a puff of magic smoke. Scarily it did this without damage to the netbook or the fuse. :-o

[Mr Larrington]

The rodent-configuration wossname under Control Panel refuses to acknowledge the presence of a middle button on the new mouse and if MSI's software has a way of making it do a double click I aten't found it yet chiz.

(Wonders if ancient version of Microsith Intellipoint would fare any better)

[Afasoas]

Good points about different vendors and batches. I've suffered from bad batches of drives at work, thankfully I don't have to deal with that any more...

Code: [Select]

$ df -g .
Filesystem    GB blocks      Free %Used    Iused %Iused Mounted on
/dev/[CENSORED]   353836.90 104281.90   71% 278788938    80% /[CENSORED]

The joys of a single 345TB filesystem...anyway...

At home though, I don't use RAID on my backup server as it is a VM running on an ESXi box, so I can't do hardware RAID (at the VM level, and don't want to trust it at the Hypervisor level). As the data is backed up elsewhere too I've opted for simple zfs mirroring instead of software RAID.

Code: [Select]

root@backup01:/# zpool list
NAME     SIZE  ALLOC   FREE    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
backup  1016G   966G  50.2G    95%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
root@backup01:/# zpool status
  pool: backup
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        backup      ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            sdb     ONLINE       0     0     0
            sdc     ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

The ESXi box currently has 32GB RAM, 2x128GB SDD and 2x2TB HDD and I've portioned off a 1TB chunk on each HDD that's visible to my backup VM which sees them as whole drives which zfs is consuming. As you can see the zpool is 95% full.

I've only got one spare SATA port on the motherboard (unless I disconnect the DVD drive) so I was going to add in the new 2TB drive and shuffle stuff around so I use the whole of the 2 of the 2TB drives as mirrors, leaving one 2TB free for other VM images.

Options for lots of storage (my brother and I are going to be each other's offsite backup using rsync...) are:-

1) Get 3 x 4TB drives and use these to replace the existing 2 x 2TB drives. The old 2TB drives I can then use as offsite backups for important stuff by taking one in to work every month and bringing the old one home. This gives me 6TB of mirrored storage.

2) Find a 4 port 6Gbps SATA controller that works well with the free version of ESXi I'm running so I can add more drives as required, there's space for 2 more 3.5" drives in the designated bays and then I've got 2x5.25" bays free that could fit another 3 HDDs. An 8 port controller might future proof it, especially if I want to add more SDDs.

3) Move the bulk backup storage to a separate HP Microserver and get 4x3TB drives for that and do RAID. This leaves the 2x2TB drives free for VMs (mostly my pet projects).

Hmm. Decisions. I'm leaning mostly towards #2 as it keeps everything in one box and costs about the same as #3.

I looked into a PCIe SATA conroller and came to the conclusion tbe cheap ones were crud. The optimal path seemed to be buying a 2nd hand Dell/LSi card. But as I wanted (at the time) ZFS to handle the RAID and that meant re-flashing the controller to do non-raid I decided against it. That and the extra power consumption.

You don't say too much about how much storage you need?

Why don't you just throw out the optical drive and add another couple of disks in a new ZFS mirror? My now 2 yr old server has never had an optical drive in it.

If you have drives in the existing pool of the same age from the same vendor, you could buy two new 2TB disks, resilver your existing mirror to have one new/one old disk and your new mirror to have one old/new disk...

[Greenbank]

I looked into a PCIe SATA conroller and came to the conclusion tbe cheap ones were crud. The optimal path seemed to be buying a 2nd hand Dell/LSi card. But as I wanted (at the time) ZFS to handle the RAID and that meant re-flashing the controller to do non-raid I decided against it. That and the extra power consumption.

I was looking at £120-ish for a reasonable 8 port SATA controller.

You don't say too much about how much storage you need?

6TB or so would be nice and stop me having to mess around with it for another 3 or 4 years. If I effectively write off the current 2x2TB drives as probably dying soon then I'd like to replace with 4x3TB.

Why don't you just throw out the optical drive and add another couple of disks in a new ZFS mirror? My now 2 yr old server has never had an optical drive in it.

I used the optical drive today to upgrade to ESXi 6.0.0, but then that's the first time probably since the initial install. I would like more SATA ports as I've got a couple of ideas for projects that require a reasonable bit of fast storage so I may need to get a few more SSDs in it, and the motherboard's two 6gbps SATA ports are already taken with the existing SSDs.

If you have drives in the existing pool of the same age from the same vendor, you could buy two new 2TB disks, resilver your existing mirror to have one new/one old disk and your new mirror to have one old/new disk...

Thought of that but I'd want more storage, I can't remember enough of zfs configuration to know whether I can do a mirror of 2x2TB + 1x4TB. That way I'd then have a seperate 2x3TB mirror to take me to 5TB total...

[Afasoas]

I looked into a PCIe SATA conroller and came to the conclusion tbe cheap ones were crud. The optimal path seemed to be buying a 2nd hand Dell/LSi card. But as I wanted (at the time) ZFS to handle the RAID and that meant re-flashing the controller to do non-raid I decided against it. That and the extra power consumption.

I was looking at £120-ish for a reasonable 8 port SATA controller.

You will need to make sure ESXi or whatever hypervisor you are running is compatible with it.

You don't say too much about how much storage you need?

6TB or so would be nice and stop me having to mess around with it for another 3 or 4 years. If I effectively write off the current 2x2TB drives as probably dying soon then I'd like to replace with 4x3TB.

Why don't you just throw out the optical drive and add another couple of disks in a new ZFS mirror? My now 2 yr old server has never had an optical drive in it.

I used the optical drive today to upgrade to ESXi 6.0.0, but then that's the first time probably since the initial install. I would like more SATA ports as I've got a couple of ideas for projects that require a reasonable bit of fast storage so I may need to get a few more SSDs in it, and the motherboard's two 6gbps SATA ports are already taken with the existing SSDs.

Could you not have done that with a USB stick? dd if=/home/user/Downloads/esxi.iso of=/dev/sdg1 bs=1M ... or if using Windows, http://rufus.akeo.ie/

Take out the ODD and you have six SATA ports to play with, two for RAID0 boot disk and 4x 3TB for 6TB of RAID10 (or striped-mirrored vdevs ins ZFS speak) - that will give you ample performance + resilience.

If you have drives in the existing pool of the same age from the same vendor, you could buy two new 2TB disks, resilver your existing mirror to have one new/one old disk and your new mirror to have one old/new disk...

Thought of that but I'd want more storage, I can't remember enough of zfs configuration to know whether I can do a mirror of 2x2TB + 1x4TB. That way I'd then have a seperate 2x3TB mirror to take me to 5TB total...

I think you might be able to do that with some clever partitioning but I'm not sure it's recommended. I know you can certainly use partitions as vdevs to create zpools, what I don't know is whether a logical partition can be made to span more than one disk.

You could always ditch the optical drive now, add 2x3TB or 2x4TB, rebuild your ZFS array in the appropriate shape  to give 4TB usable space and then resilver the remaining 2TB disks onto 3/4TB disks in future to enbiggen it as/when it's more affordable. Probably a good option if you don't need all 6/8 TB right now.

[Greenbank]

You will need to make sure ESXi or whatever hypervisor you are running is compatible with it.

VMWare don't care about a lot of controllers but someone else does:-

http://www.v-front.de/2013/11/how-to-make-your-unsupported-sata-ahci.html

Thanks for the other suggestions, still in the mulling it over stage and trying to nail down my real requirements rather than just what I want to order and play with...

[Greenbank]

Another Raspberry Pi Zero (#4 in the house along with a Model B Pi) and the 4 port USB hub (that works kind of like a HAT): https://thepihut.com/collections/raspberry-pi-zero/products/zero4u-4-port-usb-hub-for-raspberry-pi-zero

This one is for my 5-a-side (just a bunch of friends, not a league, but still quite competitive) football project:-
* a rugged box hung up on the fence next to the 5-a-side pitch (it's got to survive being hit by a football kicked hard!)
* level with the centre line and above head height on a fence
* sponge/foam padding inside and on the back (the fence vibrates a lot when the ball, or a player, hits it) and bungees to hold it in place
* Two wide angle USB cameras to cover the pitch (and overlapping somewhat)
* 32GB micro-SD card to record everything
* microphone to record sound (the microphones in most USB cameras are crap)
* 2 x two-digit 7 segment displays (4" tall digits probably) for the current score
* buttons to press to increment/decrement/reset the counters (nearest person presses the right button after a goal has gone in, we do kickoffs after each goal so there will be someone nearby it)
* 6 digit 7 segment display clock module to show the current time (so we know how long to go and also make it easier for people to time their turns in goal)
* all powered by a 5000mAh USB power pack and possibly batteries for the 7 segment displays
* 4 USB ports for: camera #1, camera #2, wifi dongle, USB microphone

Not sure whether to have the Raspberry Pi control/power the 7 segment displays or whether to just have a couple of up/down counter circuits and copy the button press pins to the raspberry pi. Probably safer (because of button bounce) to have the Pi control things, that way it knows for sure what the score is since it is controlling the displays.

When the game is finished I press a button to save everything and shut down and it gets shoved in my bag. At home I'll plug the micro-SD card into a reader and copy the files (two video streams, audio stream and the timestamps for goal button increments/decrements) over to a server for post processing.

The post processing needs to:-
* stitch the two overlapping video feeds together and get them in sync (I may have to put a couple of markers, like in the corner of QR codes, on the far fence to make this easier)
* sync the audio (I'll do a clapperboard impression in front of the box before the start of the game)
* rationalise the goal button feed (to get rid of accidental double increments and subsequent decrement or people pissing around with it)
* find the exact frames where the goals are scored (for each goal just display on a web page a choice of 20 frames from the preceding 5 seconds of the button press and I just have to click on the best one or ask it for further back/forward or some in between frames)
* this then creates a graphic overlay in the top left of the final video with the time and current score (bibs vs non-bibs)
* encode it all in something friendly to youtube (so that it doesn't have to transcode it further)
* upload it to youtube
* email out the resulting link to the players

Once I've got the frames where I know a goal has gone in I can also show short snippets of the previous n seconds and then select which player got the goal and who got the assist. For more full opta-style stats (passes, pass completion, unforced errors, length of stints in goal [some people are cheeky and don't do their full turn], etc) I'm tempted to try shipping it off to Amazon Mechanical Turk. I'm sure someone out there will spend a couple of hours wading through an hour long youtube video making notes for a few $.

Anyway, it lends itself to a nice project with lots of incremental steps (start with one camera, no microphone, no 7-seg displays, no buttons, etc) and I get to play with toys and slowly build it up.

Also a nice variation of stuff to do:-
* hardware bodging (rugged container, vibration damping, waterproofing [eventually])
* delicate hardware bodging (soldering, up/down counters [16F628A maybe])
* python coding (Raspberry Pi GPIO pin stuff)
* AV fun (frame extraction, marker detection and splicing, syncing, audio syncing, score/time overlay generation, re-encoding)
* scripting it all together (machine boot into the right state ready for the start button to be pressed, etc) and also the post-processing VM
* networking (it may have a wifi connection so it can get to NTP via a hotspot on my iPhone and get the time right as Pi doesn't have a battery powered internal clock to keep the time when it's not powered on)

Sadly two hour long 1080p video feeds (3.6GB each if 8Mbps) will be too much to upload via Wifi for post-processing whilst I'm in the pub and I don't really want to have to lug a laptop with me to do it, so it can wait until I'm home and do it all whilst I'm asleep.

[Greenbank]

And bought a couple of USB Webcams which apparently work well with Raspberry Pis, and a microphone.

Will have to rig it all up to my USB power meter to see how much it all draws when everything is chugging along.