Fettled any computer stuff today?

[Greenbank]

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.

[Greenbank]

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).

[Afasoas]

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 together the new budget silent PC ...

OOI, what's the spec?

[Afasoas]

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.

[grams]

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)

[Greenbank]

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.

[Gattopardo]

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]

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

[chrisbainbridge]

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]

Why won't any version of windows instal on the machine now!

What the fuck am I doing wrong?

[Kim]

Attracting sharks.  We've all been there.

[tiermat]

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)

[pcolbeck]

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.

[Afasoas]

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]

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.