Something Random

[ddrueding]

For my purposes I consider Proxmox a direct replacement for ESXi with fewer paywalled features. I was able to get a multi-site cluster going within an hour, and migrate VMs across easily. There were some moments of frustration, mainly because I knew all I needed to know about ESXi and having to learn again was annoying, but the Proxmox way wasn't worse (in many cases better). I just needed to learn.

Not meaning to derail the Random thread, but why did you stop using Pi hole?

 

[sedrosken]

Or heck, even a pair of dual-port 40Gbe Mellanox cards for $35

It's only 40 bucks until you add a couple transceivers and cables, by the way, then it jumps to 90 dollars. Then again, that's still surprisingly reasonable. I still think it's quite overkill for my uses though, when 2.5 or 5 would get me the full throughput of the RAID array anyway. (For context, for right now, they're not terribly fast or recent drives. I'd be shocked if the RAID managed more than 200MB/s sustained sequential.)

That assessment of Proxmox is fair, the only reason I didn't use ESXi myself was because the latest release doesn't support the RTL8169 that the board uses for a NIC and this was on a fairly shoestring budget. The last release to support that NIC is 6.7 IIRC and that was EOL'd sometime last year as I think I've said before. I had actual experience with ESXi thanks to a couple of our clients, so I was more comfortable with that for web administration, though Proxmox is fairly intuitive. Also, Proxmox is based on fairly-standard Debian, which I'm quite comfortable with adminning on the backend, so that was a nice bonus.

My web server (that pulls double duty as an IRC bouncer) is actually a VPS, I don't trust my local cable or power nearly enough to depend on them for those tasks. Again, funnily enough, it runs Debian. Heck, if I could get away with shoehorning a new enough kernel and mesa onto it, I'd probably be running Debian on my main and laptop, too. It's always there and I'm already familiar and I've never had it break in a way that wasn't my own dumb fault. I've tried solutions like TrueNAS and FreeNAS and such before for my file server, and frankly I just can't beat the simplicity and familiarity plain ol' Debian gives me. I'm aware it possibly isn't the most convenient solution out there, but it works for my uses.

I do find that the PiHole is rather limited compared to how it used to be, and I'm not sure what to blame for that other than companies getting smarter and DNS-based adblocking just getting more and more flawed as time goes on. That said, I have platforms that can't run a modern adblocker, and it does somehow still catch a few things on mobile, so having something is always better than having nothing. With Cloudflare and Google set as secondary and tertiary in the event my PiHole fails, it doesn't really cost me anything to leave it on.

 

[sedrosken]

I just realized, I probably will need to split off Samba into its own restricted VM with an older version once the update lands where they yank SMBv1 support. Half my network still depends on that!

 

[Mercutio]

Or heck, even a pair of dual-port 40Gbe Mellanox cards for $35

I use a pair of QDR Infiniband adapters between my two big systems. At the time I bought them, the 7m twinax cable was the most expensive part, but these days even that is genuinely reasonable. Even an Infiniband switch is reasonable compared to 10GbE hardware.

 

[Mercutio]

support the RTL8169 that the board uses for a NIC

I believe you can get a driver for a decent chunk of USB NICs if you really want to play with it.


re: SMBv1, you might consider setting up NFS as an alternative. Free clients exist for even DOS-based versions of Windows.

 

[sedrosken]

re: SMBv1, you might consider setting up NFS as an alternative. Free clients exist for even DOS-based versions of Windows.

Believe you me, I've not only got NFS set up on my NAS (and prefer it, on UNIX-like guests), I've investigated the various alternative network file system solutions available for Windows 9x and early NT. Nothing integrated quite so flawlessly as SMB does, to my growing distress.

 

[Handruin]

For my purposes I consider Proxmox a direct replacement for ESXi with fewer paywalled features. I was able to get a multi-site cluster going within an hour, and migrate VMs across easily. There were some moments of frustration, mainly because I knew all I needed to know about ESXi and having to learn again was annoying, but the Proxmox way wasn't worse (in many cases better). I just needed to learn.

Not meaning to derail the Random thread, but why did you stop using Pi hole?

I was having some instability issues with it while running it in a VM under linux and when it would freeze up, it took down the house internet. I was just getting frustrated with restarting and trying to debug and figure out what was causing the instability.

 

[Handruin]

I use a pair of QDR Infiniband adapters between my two big systems. At the time I bought them, the 7m twinax cable was the most expensive part, but these days even that is genuinely reasonable. Even an Infiniband switch is reasonable compared to 10GbE hardware.

I've not looked into infiniband switches, I just assumed they be expensive but that's great to hear they are not. I went down the road of used 10Gb switches and ended up with a reasonably priced Brocade/Rukus ICX 7250-48 for ~$300. It's been rock solid and quiet which I cannot ask for more than that and I was able to get all the firmware updated and licensing unlocked.

 

[Mercutio]

Just had to drive an hour to resolve a trouble call for an on premises server system, the document management system used by a paperless insurance agency.

"It's been making a terrible beeping noise all morning! Also all our computers are down for some reason. Are those two things somehow related?"
"Is the black thing on the bottom of the stack of hardware lit up? Are there any red lights on it? What does it say?"
"Uh... I don't know what thing you're talking about. Thing? Stack? What are words even? How do pants work?"
"FFS I'll be right there."

I walked in and saw that the power cord for the UPS, which is safety orange, was not connected to the wall outlet.
The system was in a closet that's supposed to be locked and has a half-size rack in front of said outlet. Their phone system and electrical panel are in the same place, but I can't think of a reason for anyone with a key to open it up otherwise. I guess someone wanted a morning off work.

I've had cleaning people unknowingly unplug servers in the past but I haven't had a call like that in probably over 10 years.

Plus side, teppanyaki lunch.

 

[Handruin]

It's always something isn't it? Even will well-made plans people still find a way to fuck it up.

Last night I had an interesting situation with my dishwasher. It's been slowly dying and it's been telling me this by way of occasionally screeching loudly during wash cycles. I have a new one on order and scheduled for install which I thought would be today but apparently I got the month wrong.

Anyway, last night I ran the final load of dishes but this one was different. The dishwasher screeched all the way through the entire 60+ min cycle which it has never done before. After the countdown reached zero, it was oddly still screeching. I open the washer door and still, it wants to audibly complain even louder. I turned off the power button and yet, still, no change in noise. Last resort I kill the circuit breaker figuring we'll be done here, but nope, the noises continue.

Turns out the noise was some kind of solenoid valve for the water source into the dishwasher and it wasn't fully closing. This was confirmed by the fact that the base of the dishwasher was now filling up slowly with water while powered off. The noise stopped when I manually closed the water supply valve under the sink which was a relief.

The sound was so mechanical that I was having difficulty comprehending how it wasn't turning off when I killed the power. I even continued to kill circuit breakers thinking maybe the previous owners wired it in with something else in the kitchen.

 

[sedrosken]

Ouch, Handy. Manual dishwashing until you get the part replaced, then? I don't have room in my place for a dishwasher, and I live alone, so I have no reason to really need one, but I remember them almost being more trouble than they were worth too.

Merc, I have calls like that roughly monthly. Thankfully they're generally pretty okay about getting it plugged back up themselves when I ask, but I've definitely made the drive of shame at least once this quarter.

Plus side, I had a nice calzone at a local pizza place. One of the ones with an actual brick oven, even.

 

[Mercutio]

The sound was so mechanical that I was having difficulty comprehending how it wasn't turning off when I killed the power. I even continued to kill circuit breakers thinking maybe the previous owners wired it in with something else in the kitchen.

The place my family lived in as a teen was like that. It was added on to so much that it wound up with multiple electrical panels and in a couple cases, something was on a breaker in a less-than-obvious panel. It had a downstairs finished basement that had been turned into a private apartment, including both kitchen and bathroom, and it was all a huge mess because the two kitchens and all four bathrooms had a common but essentially inaccessible shaft where all the plumbing and wiring lived.

sed, I feel your pain. Earlier in my career I got called out because computers didn't come on during blackouts, or to fix internet service because a DSL modem didn't make dialup noises. Those people are out there and fortunately they pay for service calls.

My other dumb recent service call was being told that someone's mission-critical laptop was having screen problems. They kept sending my screenshots, which apparently didn't include the defect in question. Turned out they'd accidentally marked on their screen with a sharpie.

 

[ddrueding]

I used to have a bunch of calls and drives like that, but now that I live on the other side of the planet it is less possible. Fortunately everyone knows how to do a Zoom call from their phone, so I just have them switch to the other camera and take me on a remote tour.

 

[Mercutio]

Ant-Man Quantumania is maybe the most 3D trippy thing Marvel has done since the first Doctor Strange movie If you are a fan of substances, take substances. It's also doing a whole space opera story rather than a comedy heist like the other entries in the series.

 

[LunarMist]

I'm not surprised that heavy drugs would be required for an adult to suspend disbelief in such a ludicrous premise. LOL

 

[Handruin]

I haven't read great things about the Quantumania so far so I'm unlikely to bother going to the theater for it. I'm also glad I didn't go to see Wakanda Forever. That was a D+ or C- at best for me. The MCU burnout is real and these big-character movies are becoming the things I disliked in DC movies. No redeemable characters, way, way too much fast paced action that's so far over the top it's just boring. Bad CGI quality.

 

[sedrosken]

I don't think I've watched an actual new movie in like, 5 years or so. They just don't interest me. Granted, I'm neither into Marvel nor DC characters, so seemingly 70% of the landscape is gone just on that alone.

 

[Handruin]

There's been some really good movies over the past 5 years that have nothing to do with MCU/DC. If you're not really into movies, then they probably won't interest you much.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm more of a fan of Marvel than DC, but the last movie I watched (at home or theater) was the first Ironman when it came out. I have a hard time committing 2h+ to a single thing.

 

[LunarMist]

Is it ADHD?

 

[sedrosken]

Probably just general overscheduling, as busy as dd is these days. As for me, yes, it is ADHD, actually, at least partially. I went off of my medicine when I turned 17, it was causing more harm than it was helping. I too have a hard time committing more than a an hour, maybe two, to a task at a time, but for me it's not a lack of time, just a lack of ability to remain on one train of thought. It suits me fine in my work, as I can easily context-switch when I get a call.

 

[ddrueding]

ADHD might have something to do with it, but it could just be the opportunity cost of spending that time doing that.

And I'll correct myself. I have watched a few films since then, but all were with my daughter to see her reaction and discuss the films. We've done the original 3 Star Wars, the entire LoTR trilogy, the first 4 Harry Potter, and we just watched The Matrix (as we were discussing the likelihood of this all being a simulation.

I don't consider that watching movies as it is teaching. Lots of pausing and discussions.

 

[Mercutio]

dd, give Puss in Boots 3 a shot. Not kidding. I saw it in the theater AFTER I'd pirated it. It's enjoyable for both kids and adults.

I'm obviously a pretty hardcore Marvel person. I go to midnight showings and I also usually go as part of a group to see them as well. We average a theater outing about once every six weeks as an alternative to a gathering to a tabletop gaming night. This sometimes means seeing a movie I don't really care for, but I still think of going to the theater as a treat.

 

[Mercutio]

I need to share with everyone the greatest movie of all time. I am making the GenZs watch it tonight.

 

[LunarMist]

No it wasn't. That film was stupid even at the time. After The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Bostwick was never the same.
There were many fine films in 1982 like. Das Boot, Bladerunner, Sophie's Choice, Fanny and Alexander*, The Verdict, etc. If you are from SoCal, of course Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
* the movie release was good, but abbreviated compared to the 312 min. full version.

 

[Mercutio]

LM, you have much to learn about awesome movies. This movie is bad. Everyone knew it was bad. It is still AWESOME. Hal Needham stunts? Motorcycles? DUNE BUGGIES WITH LASERS? Fuck yes.

I lost a dear friend last year who had a more-than-passing friendship with Barry Bostwick through Rocky Horror Fandom. He was in the process of convincing him to come on his bad movies podcast specifically to discuss Megaforce, which remains a masterpiece of awesome and awful cinema. It actually breaks my heart that it's not going to happen.

Tonight, we are watching RRRR, which is everything you could possibly want in a movie that is in Hindi. Dance scenes. Punching out tigers. Beating up every white dude in India. It is extremely manly.

 

[LunarMist]

You know I did not finish film school.

 

[sedrosken]

Hm. I'm troubleshooting a huge issue I'm having with frankly ridiculous IO delay figures on the Proxmox server. Like, there are times where it'll just sit there with the CPU barely going used but IO delay is going completely nuts -- these VMs are running off of an NVMe SSD for pete's sake. In particular, this seems to be when my Minecraft server is having to load a ton of new (or even old, but mostly new) chunks, and yes, it is very jarring in-gameplay. I made a fairly rookie mistake and accepted defaults for things like the LVM provisioning on the host when I was setting it up, and letting the VMs run off of file-based disk images instead of logical volumes on the bare metal (?). For the NAS, and for the network services VM, this doesn't seem to be a huge deal, but the Minecraft server apparently hates this.

Unfortunately with the coming week looking pretty busy, I'm probably waiting until the coming weekend to sort this out... I think it's going to boil down to backing up all the VM images, deleting both LVM pools, remaking a new (much smaller) one for the ISOs to live on -- it doesn't need to be big since I'm backing up to external storage -- and then remaking the VM disk volume group such that I can then restore the backup for the Minecraft server to a real logical volume... hopefully. I'm hoping I'm properly understanding this and I'm not about to just nuke my server, but then again... that's what backups are for I guess.

 

[Handruin]

LM, you have much to learn about awesome movies. This movie is bad. Everyone knew it was bad. It is still AWESOME. Hal Needham stunts? Motorcycles? DUNE BUGGIES WITH LASERS? Fuck yes.

I lost a dear friend last year who had a more-than-passing friendship with Barry Bostwick through Rocky Horror Fandom. He was in the process of convincing him to come on his bad movies podcast specifically to discuss Megaforce, which remains a masterpiece of awesome and awful cinema. It actually breaks my heart that it's not going to happen.

Tonight, we are watching RRRR, which is everything you could possibly want in a movie that is in Hindi. Dance scenes. Punching out tigers. Beating up every white dude in India. It is extremely manly.

I really enjoyed RRR. What a ride this movie takes you through; I highly recommend watching it also.

 

[ddrueding]

sedrosken, also make sure you allocated more than the default RAM to your server, or it will be hitting the disk way more often than necessary. The other changes also sound good, but you may be able to avoid them if you like.

 

[Mercutio]

Since you're using someone else's VM, is it possible the actual disk image was thin-provisioned and/or set to use dynamic RAM?

 

[LunarMist]

Is it just me or is the Amazon becoming inhospitable? Half the time I am asked to read some illegible codes and can't get it right sometimes. Alternatively there is audio, but that requires computer sound and no other sound. It's ridiculous to do this ten times a day.

 

[jtr1962]

Is it just me or is the Amazon becoming inhospitable? Half the time I am asked to read some illegible codes and can't get it right sometimes. Alternatively there is audio, but that requires computer sound and no other sound. It's ridiculous to do this ten times a day.

My beef with Amazon is the search engine. I search for one thing, and get a whole bunch of totally unrelated items popping up, along with a few hits for the item I'm actually looking for. Ebay's search engine always gives me only what I'm looking for. Are Amazon's programmers so incompetent that they can't even make a search engine which works?

 

[LunarMist]

I just assumed that was because the Amazonian sellers have numerous bogus tags in there that cause their useless junk to appear in unrelated searches.

 

[sedrosken]

sedrosken, also make sure you allocated more than the default RAM to your server, or it will be hitting the disk way more often than necessary. The other changes also sound good, but you may be able to avoid them if you like.

The MC server VM has 8GB allocated to it, with 7GB set as the minimum and maximum allocation for the JVM args, leaving a gigabyte or a bit less for the rest of the OS, which on anything but console Linux would be worrying, but Debian sits at 92MB used at a bash prompt for me, so...

I'd like to double that but I just don't currently have the RAM spare -- it's something I'll revisit likely once I buy another 16GB DDR4 kit for it. The Proxmox host is sitting at around 70-80% used with all three VMs running concurrently, but neither the host nor any of the VMs are reporting any swap usage whatsoever.

Since you're using someone else's VM, is it possible the actual disk image was thin-provisioned and/or set to use dynamic RAM?

It's my VM on my Proxmox host here at my apartment. That said, that is the standard configuration I believe, and I accepted that at the time out of a lack of knowing any better. Hopefully that improves immensely once I pass through a real logical volume, preallocated explicitly for it, on the disk.

 

[sedrosken]

For other news, I've been playing with a Cirrus Logic GD5428 card in the hopes of having a more compatible card for use with alternative operating systems since the VLB Trio64V+ is so weirdly rare (likely not meant to exist explicitly) that drivers only exist for Windows 3.x and 95, drying up in January of 1997. The generic S3 driver for Windows NT corrupts the display, and XFree86 on Debian 2.1-2.2 has absolutely no clue what it is, locking up the entire machine when trying to invoke either the S3 display server or the generic SVGA one, though that bit may well be because modelines are a huge barrier to X use on early Linux.

First card I got was a dud. It happens, I really ought to have known better since "untested" on eBay means "definitely tested, definitely doesn't work". I thought I'd be able to coax it into functioning with a VBIOS flash, as I've seen that work before, but no. Didn't spend a lot on it though, so I'm not too broken up. I can rob it of its video memory at my leisure.

Second card acts the same... but this one is tested and working...? On a whim I try it with a real 486 in the upgrade socket, and it boots right up after complaining about the CMOS checksum being invalid... but the plot thickens, because after removing the real 486, now the 5428 works with the regular 486BL mounted on the board. Talk about bizarre -- apparently the CMOS does store some amount of information about the VGA card, meanwhile I just figured it looked for a ROM at C8000 and just handed over the reins. I really did figure as far as the BIOS was concerned, a VGA card is a VGA card is a VGA card, and I guess swapping CPU types jolts the CMOS into just discarding everything and re-detecting everything anyway.

The first card still doesn't give a display, but it no longer gives a beep code, either. Weird.

The 5428 is a little bit more of a pain to use than the Trio in some ways -- for example it doesn't autodetect the display specs through DDC, instead there's a DOS tool you run to flip some bits in the card's registers in order to get more than 60Hz at 640x480 and 56Hz at 800x600. Once that bit of fiddling is done with though, it's fine -- I have my video mode set to 800x600 in 256 colors at 72Hz. Thank God for multisync CRTs that can handle these oddball refresh rates -- I have a feeling an LCD would just look at that and go "lol you're on your own."

Also there doesn't seem to be a card or chipset-specific VESA 2.0 VBIOS extension TSR available for it. I figured as much since the 5428 is, IIRC, a 1993 part made well into 1994. UniVBE 6.7, the free release, doesn't recognize the chip despite explicitly mentioning it in its readme. Running real SciTech Display Doctor v6.53 fixes me right up though. That said, the linear framebuffer doesn't get enabled apparently because on systems with more than 14MB of system memory enabling the LFB can cause lockups with this chipset. An interesting quirk. SimCity2000 and WarCraft II run perfect, though.

Overall it's a bit slower than the Trio, but it actually functions better, believe it or not -- no corruption in screensavers, no weird corruption issues with the Neverhood, it's almost like this was a card intended for this class of machine, go figure.

The S3 is nice as a display piece, being so comparatively rare.

 

[Mercutio]

I have never in my life thought of using a piece of hardware as a display item. I do keep some old stuff in plastic bins, including a few old graphics cards and sound cards, and the oldest of the disk drives. I'm most weirdly sentimental about my first CD burner and my Soundblaster AWE32, which was the first card I had that had MIDI samples up to the quality level I wanted for realistic piano.

 

[Mercutio]

Humble Bundle's Turkey-Syria Earthquake relief package is a crazy good deal even if most of the products are Steam games. X-Com 2 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker by themselves are probably worth $30.

 

[sedrosken]

I have never in my life thought of using a piece of hardware as a display item. I do keep some old stuff in plastic bins, including a few old graphics cards and sound cards, and the oldest of the disk drives. I'm most weirdly sentimental about my first CD burner and my Soundblaster AWE32, which was the first card I had that had MIDI samples up to the quality level I wanted for realistic piano.

I wouldn't have either until I got a nice bookshelf and a place of my own. I hadn't thought of myself as sentimental over these things until then, but I've even bought some boxed hardware just to display the box since then, as well as show off the boxes of hardware I'm using. I guess it keeps them handy. I bought a shrinkwrapped mobile PIII a couple months back because it was only like 10 bucks and it was a coppermine... at 450MHz. I never knew they went that low with Coppermine, I thought that started at 500.

 

[LunarMist]

I threw out a lot of old stuff during the Pandemoneic times. The last thing I would like to do is remind myself about the old 32-bit computer days.
I do have an XP laptop or two and a 5th gen NUC with Windows 7, but they take little space. I also have a drawer of old PCIe cards that probably should be whittled down.