millerjs.org

August 2018

• The Dome

  A couple of weeks ago I found a very reasonably priced iMac G4 being sold locally, and having always been somewhat interested in them (and having never had one before) I decided to get in touch with the seller and go pick it up. What I ended up getting was a fantastic condition first generation iMac G4/800. It has a few minor scuffs and marks on it here and there, but nothing a couple of alcohol wipes couldn't take care of. What has kept me away from iMac G4s in the past has been the fact that, by and large, they are OS X only machines. I have very little interest in PPC OS X as it largely still feels too new to be "retro" and yet is too slow and incompatible to be used for much. I tinker with it from time to time, but System 7 and Mac OS 8 and 9 are where most of my interest lies. Only the first revision of the first generation of iMac G4 could run 9, and even then only it's special version of 9.2.2 (which is not hard to find), but that is good enough for me. I decided to…

  Permanent link to “The Dome”

July 2018

• mSATA RAID?

  Even though it's in packed away in the storage unit right now, I have been thinking a lot about the C220M3. Specifically about its own storage. Right now the only aspect of the machine that I have not seen to in one way or another is drives, specifically drive caddies - which, frankly, is not an uncommon issue with servers. Some machines, like the G5-7 HPs, and a few generations of Dells, share caddies (within their respective brands, granted). Because of this, their caddies are incredibly cheap. For this cisco, on the other hand, the caddies are relatively more expensive, often around $15 each. It's often more cost effective to just go ahead and buy caddies with drives in them already, provided you're okay with it being spinning media. The one drive I have for the machine now, the drive it came with, is an A03-D600GA2 - a Western Digital 600GB 10kRPM SAS hard drive. Aside from being a spinner, and having all of the downsides of spinners, there's nothing wrong with it. Additional A03…

  Permanent link to “mSATA RAID?”

• NVMe Upgrade

  I found a good deal for a 480GB Kingston NVMe drive (true NVMe, not the "SATA on m.2 rubbish) as part of prime day, so I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and slap one in the Inspiron. The main advantage this would give me is the ability to configure the second drive, the 2.5" SATA drive, as a secondary boot drive for linux, or additional storage if necessary. A day layer the drive showed up in a tiny envelope and the upgrade could commence. Prior to wiping the 2.5" drive, I ran Veeam to get a full system image over to the NAS. I wasn't planning to restore any data from it, but just in case something wonky happened I wanted to have an image I could quickly restore from. Under normal circumstances I would have simply mirrored the 2.5 over to the NVMe drive, but I wanted to use this as an opportunity to upgrade from home to pro, and I wanted to do that as a fresh install rather than an upgrade from within windows. The physical installation was a breeze - pop off the…

  Permanent link to “NVMe Upgrade”

• SpeedStep® Limiting…

  This is something that will need to be further fleshed out by benchmarks and research, but I wanted to start writing about it now, before I forget. More is certainly to come. Context First, a little backstory for context. The company I work for, Esri, just released version 10.6.1 of their ArcGIS Enterprise product. Something I found very appealing about this release is that it includes a new interface and set of tools for processing imagery from UAVs into orthophotos, DSMs, and DEMs, called Ortho Maker. Esri has a desktop product that does this as well, Drone2Map, which is based on the Pix4D Mapper engine. Ortho Maker is unique in comparison because it is intended to run on server infrastructure rather than workstations or HEDTs, and anyone who knows me will know that I find that incredibly appealing. So, when 10.6.1 was formally released, I wiped the TS140 'goonie' to a clean slate and configured it as follows: 2x8GB RAM (I moved the other 2 to TS140#1), 256GB Samsung 840 Pro boot…

  Permanent link to “SpeedStep® Limiting Single-Threaded Tasks”

• GPU Weirdness

  Earlier this week I encountered a very strange problem with the 1050ti in my desktop TS140 - the same setup I had posted about here earlier. This is what happened. The machine had just completed a windows update and prompted to reboot. I was working on the other TS140, goonie, at the time and needed local video on it, so while the desktop-TS140 rebooted I pulled it's displayport cable and moved it to goonie. I finished doing what I needed to do and moved the cable back, yet, no video. So I reset the machine - the BIOS splash displayed as normal, but when the loading screen normally transitions to the windows login screen, the display went dark. And not just black - no video signal was being received. I figured a windows update nuked something, so I booted off my veeam recovery disk and restored the previous day's backup (yay for taking regular backups), then rebooted, but encountered the same behavior. As soon as windows started, the display went dark. So I grabbed my windows 10…

  Permanent link to “GPU Weirdness”

• New Laptop!

  The last "contemporary" laptop I purchased was a Samsung Chromebook, for about $150, three years ago. It worked well enough, but as a then-low end machine with a small 1366x768 screen and not much in the way of RAM, CPU power, or storage, I didn't end up doing much with it. Prior to that was my Lenovo T410, a thinkpad purchased as a refurb unit in late 2010 while I was in college. The T410 was my daily driver all through college, and until a couple of years after, when I decided that I no longer really needed a laptop as my main machine, and would rather use a desktop. The T410 never went anywhere, but despite having 8GB of RAM and an SSD did start to feel "old" fairly quickly. Granted, this was a first generation i5 from 2010, and while in 2014 it was still capable, it had it's limitations. The battery was long gone, and the CPU seemed to always run hot, no matter how often I would tear it down and blow out dust and replace the thermal paste. Every key on the…

  Permanent link to “New Laptop!”

• Drakware ADB2USB

  Not long ago a friend of mine (hey defor!) gave me a few APple ADB keyboards - specifically including an Apple Extended Keyboard (the I, not the II that is far more popular). It sat in a box for a bit until I was able to clean off enough desk space to actually use it on my old mac desk, but once I did I immediately remembered why I liked it so much. I'm not a mechanical keyboard enthusiast as some are, but I do really like the general feel of mechanical keyboards, and this one is no different. Years ago, with my first collection of mac stuff, I had one or two, but ended up getting rid of them like I got rid of most everything else when I had to move. Back then few people were interested in hanging on to such things, and as it was the market was flooded with them and there was little interesting, and the keyboards I had weren't particularly pretty specimens, but they were nice to type on. Around the same time, mid to late 2000s, I started regularly visiting a the local university's…

  Permanent link to “Drakware ADB2USB”

June 2018

• ADS-B and PiAware

  I have run some form of an RTL-SDR based ADS-B receiver every since I first learned it was possible back in college. The idea of using a cheap ($10-20) USB radio to pick up aircraft transponder signals, and then use some open source software to decode and visualize it was beyond cool. A few years ago flightware came out with a program called "PiAware" where if you used their software (a combination of raspbian and dump1090 plus some of their own customizations) you could feed your data into their system to help augment their data, and in the process you got a free premium account. I never used this because 1) I wasn't interested in a premium account, and 2) I ran my own customized version of dump1090 and didn't want to lose out on my sweet added features. Additionally, even though I know that the software can be run on any linux system, I had always felt that the Raspberry Pi was under-powered and not stable enough to run like this for an extended period of time. About a…

  Permanent link to “ADS-B and PiAware”

• Re-Fitting the…

  When I first configured the TS140 as my new desktop, I ran into an issue that I pretty much immediately ignored - caused by the 1050Ti's fan shroud. The front panel USB3.0 header and fifth SATA port were completely blocked. Not a "tight fit" situation, but absolutely blocked. My solution was to simply not have front panel USB or a fifth USB port, but that got old quick. Turns out easily accessible USB ports are added to the fronts of many cases for a reason, who would have guessed. Also, I eventually decided I needed to use the optical drive, and the only spare SATA connection was the one blocked by the card, so I had no choice. My initial solution was to just hack that corner of the shroud off with a dremel and side cutters, but I stopped that line of thought before it got much further than that. Not only would it permanently disfigure the card (making it much harder to sell should I chose to) but I didn't know for sure that the actual heatsink wasn't also playing a role in…

  Permanent link to “Re-Fitting the 1050Ti for the TS140”

May 2018

• Maine: Day 1

  I'm actually writing this on day 2 because I didn't have a great opportunity to sit down a write yesterday - or maybe I just didn't want to. Yesterday was great though - the previous day we flew into Portland and after re-exploring the city a bit, we picked up our car (an absolutely ridiculous Infinity Q60 coupe - yay points!) and drove up to the L.L. Bean store to complete the pilgrimage. While we didn't end up getting anything I did decide that I will (eventually) pick up a Hacylon Piranta knife - it's a normal looking folding pocket knife, but instead of a typical fixed blade it uses detachable/replaceable scalpel blades which are both super cheap and sharp. After that we drove back down to North Portland to meet up with some family, my grandfather's brother and his wife. We spent the rest of that evening chatting and catching up, then the following morning we went to the excellent Portland Pottery for breakfast and coffee. A bit before noon we decided to head off, but not before…

  Permanent link to “Maine: Day 1”

• Maine: Day 0

  Now for something different from previous posts, but probably more blog worthy - Travel! For the past two years Liz (my wife) and I have been traveling to Maine for our "anniversary". I say "anniversary" because traveling to Maine in early April is ill advised, or so we have learned. We'll be in Mid Coast region for the most part, around Camden and similar small towns, but will ultimately go back up to Acadia as well. We're in the Charlotte airport at the moment and will be flying into Portland shortly, then we'll spend the night with family there and continue our travel north.

  Permanent link to “Maine: Day 0”

• Fun Little HP Tower

  While there isn't a whole lot I like about living in Charlotte, having easy access to a place called "The Grid" is really awesome. The Grid is a store run by Goodwill, and unlike your typical Goodwill, The Grid only sells tech - computers, TVs, game consoles and games, lots of accessories - if it plugs into a TV or Computer, it'll show up there. Quite a few of their donations come from local corporations and businesses, and often really interesting hardware shows up there - it's actually where I found the then bare-bones ML350 G6. Lots of machines they get still work fine, and so they get tested and have windows installed on them, and while they aren't too poorly priced, they are priced higher than I'm interested in, especially given that I don't care for a licensed OS, RAM, or storage devices. Back in the far corner there's a series of shelves for the "as-is" laptops and desktops - stuff that is either too old to bother testing (rarely older than a core2, granted…

  Permanent link to “Fun Little HP Tower”

• New CPUs! (And more…

  The CPUs and heatsink actually arrived on Friday, two days ago, and I'm just now getting around to writing the post. I don't have a whole lot to say about the upgrade process, it was pretty typical. I only really ran into two snafus: 1) I slightly dropped one of them while placing it in the socket, and the corner fell right on the pins. Normally I wouldn't really be worried but these E5s are rather big and heavy, and two-three pins were definitely bent. Thankfully, with a needle and magnifying glass I was able to easily realign them and the CPU has registered just fine. Also thankfully it was the second CPU socket, so in the event that I trashed the pins, at least the first socket could still work (AFAIK it's not possible to put a CPU just in the second socket of these boards, and I'm not too keen to find out anyways). The 2)nd snafu was that I didn't realize that hyperthreading was disabled - presumably because the precious CPU was just 4c/4t - so all of my initial benchmarks are…

  Permanent link to “New CPUs! (And more?)”

• "New" Desktop

  Since beginning the process of moving services to the C220 and phasing out the TS140, I have been wondering what to do with the TS140. It's still a very capable machine, but since the C220 has replaced it as a server it needs a new role. I knew the E3-1225v3 (TS140) and i5-6400 (desktop) were fairly closely matched, but I never compared them directly. They are very similar CPUs, but the 1225 does win out by about 10%, likely because of the higher base clock and turbo boost speed. Otherwise they both have 4c/4t and consume about the same amount of power, though the 6400 is a newer generation and probably better. The main things that drew me to using the TS140 as a desktop were: Nicer, smaller case More, faster, RAM (32GB ECC vs 16GB) My 1050ti doesn't require PCIe power, which the TS140 doesn't offer without swapping the power supply The TS140 has more USB3 ports Onboard Intel Soft-RAID There were some issues in switching though: The 1050ti blocks one of the SATA ports as well as the…

  Permanent link to “"New" Desktop”

• First Wave of Disk…

  First off, I will heartily admit that these benchmarks are by no means good, I just wanted to do them quickly. They were performed in Arch with the gnome-disks tool's built in benchmark. All this tells us is "striped SSDs are faster than single HDDs!" What I really should do is get some good (and identical) HDDs and perform the same test, and test the SSDs standalone as well. I don't want to fiddle with it that much, so this is what we have. It would be better to run these tests bare metal, not through a VM/Host, but seeing as I am going to be using this machine solely for VMs, it made sense to me to know what the VM performance is going to be. I don't really care about the absolute performance, since all it will tell me is how much overhead ESXi is injecting into the situation, and I don't really care about that. In any case, I think my RAID1+0 of four 240GB drives will perform great.

  Permanent link to “First Wave of Disk Benchmarks”

• Adaptec in the…

  So far these posts have been severely lacking in media, so this one is going to have a ton of pictures to overcompensate. I got home, and after talking to and congratulating my wife for completing her first day at a new job (woo!) began the process of installing the Adaptec 2405 into the C220M3. The longest part of the process was waiting for updates to finish running on a Windows 7 VM. Once that was done it was pop the lid, install the card. Done. Sort of. The card fits just right into the PCI1 riser, you can see the two SAS connectors very conveniently close on the motherboard... but there may not be enough slack in the cables.... Yay! Cisco provided additional cabling under one of the plastic shields! The SAS cable reaches the extra two inches with no problems. Time to boot it up... It works! Hooray! (Ignore the 15 minutes it took me to figure out how to re-enable option ROMs in the BIOS...) I moved my two 128GB SSDs to bays 7 and 8 for the test. Pulled them into a striped array…

  Permanent link to “Adaptec in the Cisco!”

• Figuring out the…

  In the past week or so since my last post, I've been chewing on the questions I listed pretty much non-stop, and I'm pretty sure I have made a decision - or series of decisions, about what to do. I have the ML350 G6 listed, right now for $300, but who knows. I put both X5660s back in it as well as 32GB RAM (6x4s and 4x2s) leaving me with 32GB left for the C220M3. I also dropped a dual-gig ethernet card in, a 3.5" 500GB spinner, and left in two 2.5" drive trays. Hopefully it doesn't take too long to sell, but that's what I said last time. As for the C220M3, the main issue was on deciding what CPUs to go with. Previously, I had been dead set on the v2 versions of the E5 CPUs, for no good reason other than "new!" Having now spent some time looking at benchmarks, I'm ready to loosen up a bit. The v1s are a year older and about 5-15% slower than their equivalent v2s, but they are significantly less expensive. For example: the E5-2630v2 (2.6GHz 6c/12t) retails at about…

  Permanent link to “Figuring out the servers Part II”

April 2018

• Getting started and…

  Okay, well, I have had this blogging platform (or whatever it's called) up and running for about three months now, so I figured I might as well go ahead and post something. I don't have a good introductory post idea or a well structured project, but I have been thinking about my home lab quite a bit lately and I need to start recording some of this mess. I have a lot of computers, new and old, super powered and super dinky. Right now what I'm most interested in organizing and planning for are the newer machines that can handle modern workloads and are actually (potentially) useful to me. Right now what I'm looking at is as follows: (specifically for "infrastructure" machines) TS140 * Main server, some aspects change a lot. Right now it runs all my services aside from storage. * E3-1220v3, 4x4GB DDR3 ECC REG, 2x480GB SSD RAID0, Ubuntu 16.04.4 * SSDs don't need to be RAID'd, or setup dual 240GB in RAID0 instead. * RAID0 only used recently for performance, and it's not…

  Permanent link to “Getting started and figuring stuff out (what am I doing with these servers?)”