pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-12-24, 18:19:

I need to get your attention: Not supposed to spend using poor quality items for a data & VM server. […]
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RandomStranger wrote on 2023-12-22, 16:04:

Last week I've built the NAS I've been meaning to build for a while. An Intenso 128GB SSD for the OS, 3×6TB hard drives in RAID […]
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RandomStranger wrote on 2023-12-16, 12:05:

Modern hardware acquired, time to get into some modern activities!

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Last week I've built the NAS I've been meaning to build for a while. An Intenso 128GB SSD for the OS, 3×6TB hard drives in RAID 5 for data storage on a Gigabyte GA-H61N-D2V with 8GB of DDR3-1600. All running OpenMediaVault 6.9

Initially I wanted to use a Celeron G550T, but ended up being underpowered so I intended to replace it with an I3-3220T. I just found one on a local trading site on Monday and arrived yesterday. Except the CPU I received was the plain i3-3220. Double checked the listing. It had the right model and the photos have also shown the T variant, so I issued a complaint. The plain variant I got has a 60% higher TDP and that matters when you run it 24/7 for years. The seller promised me a full refund, so we'll see what happens.

For the time being I'm using the i3 I got while keeping my eye open for a T variant.

Otherwise with the upgraded CPU performance it runs great and has plenty of power in reserve if I were to add features like cloud server functions, surveillance cams and smart home stuff.

IMG_20231216_141005.jpgIMG_20231216_141203.jpgIMG_20231216_141215.jpgIMG_20231216_174430.jpg

I need to get your attention:
Not supposed to spend using poor quality items for a data & VM server.

Intenso SSD is not good quality storage and cannot be trusted in your use case, these generic SSD in general fail often, performance issues. I always specify Samsung (not QVO), Micron, some Intel and Crucial and WD blue or black but not WD SA510 model (performance issues and poorly perceived quality.)

Thanks for the warning. I myself never had issues with Intenso flash storage media and user rewieves were good. It's only the OS that being stored on that drive and that's all there ever will be. It should barely be touched under normal circumstances and when it is, mostly for reading. I'll image it out of caution so if it ever fails restoration will be quick and clean.

I upgraded an old laptop from Lubuntu 18.04 to 22.04. I still need to fix screen tearing (Intel HD 3000), but that was a "simple" xorg.conf setting (setting AccelMode to UXA) in 18.04.

Does Sandy Bridge count as modern? That i3-2330M certainly doesn't have modern performance (a Core 2 Duo is significantly faster in some applications, and not even single-threaded ones), but it can handle web browsing under Linux. It just can't handle anything in Windows. For example, watching a Twitch stream gives me 95-100% CPU usage at 360p under Windows 7 while Firefox eats up all 4GB of RAM until it hits virtual memory hard enough to totally lock up the system. In Lubuntu, I get 40% CPU usage at 720p60 while htop reports 1.3GB RAM usage (for the entire system, not just Firefox). I haven't even installed the right Linux driver to get hardware video decoding, but even if I did, HD 3000 doesn't support any modern codecs.

I also reinstalled my Lubuntu VM since it was upgraded from 18.04 and a lot of unused stuff was left behind. After reinstalling, I had to turn off 3D acceleration in Virtualbox because it made window dragging painfully slow. Strangely, that didn't happen before the reinstall. I made an additional VM with Linux Mint, which I think will be my distro of choice for my main computer when I get pissed off enough at Windows.

I even got a special Christmas Internet upgrade. I noticed that stuff was downloading at 11Mbps instead of 8Mbps.

Sandy bridge has poorest rating in portable segment except i7, always! I had to drop a core on a i5 in this USFF HP 8200 to bring up clocks to reasonable speed.

Replace that CPU with i7-264oM. If you are unwilling to pay, go with i5 but you will not get best clockings. This what my mother's 12 years old notebook have the i7 and is decent with a good SSD and 512GB minimum for best write speeds.

Try Ivy Bridge instead if the computer supports one. No 35W through.

You will have to go much newer to get to 25W processor and best rating is i5 and i7. Celeron, Pentium and i3 are locked down clock, also No hyper-treading.

Cheers,

twiz11 wrote on 2023-12-24, 21:25:

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2023-12-19, 04:33:

Me and the missus put on a compendium of crackin' tunes and finally finished the three ginormous puzzles we've been working on s […]
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Me and the missus put on a compendium of crackin' tunes and finally finished the three ginormous puzzles we've been working on since August or September. We actually received the puzzles for Christmas last year and figured, well shit, we'd better finish them before the gift giver comes over again this year!

All three thousand pieces have been lovingly glued together, and I can say with utmost confidence that she's a brick....house.
We decided to showcase them in the basement, just above some of the old computers. 😀 IMG_0735.jpg
IMG_0738.jpg

what is on that mac in the bottom left corner

After Dark fish/aquarium screensaver. 😀

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-12-26, 23:39:

Sandy bridge has poorest rating in portable segment except i7, always! I had to drop a core on a i5 in this USFF HP 8200 to b […]
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Sandy bridge has poorest rating in portable segment except i7, always! I had to drop a core on a i5 in this USFF HP 8200 to bring up clocks to reasonable speed.

Replace that CPU with i7-264oM. If you are unwilling to pay, go with i5 but you will not get best clockings. This what my mother's 12 years old notebook have the i7 and is decent with a good SSD and 512GB minimum for best write speeds.

Try Ivy Bridge instead if the computer supports one. No 35W through.

You will have to go much newer to get to 25W processor and best rating is i5 and i7. Celeron, Pentium and i3 are locked down clock, also No hyper-treading.

Cheers,

I think you're the first person I've seen who didn't wax poetic about the entire Sandy Bridge generation. This i3 has HT, but it doesn't help much. I thought about upgrading, but I don't know if it's worth it. This is a Toshiba Satellite L750 (the same laptop I regretted buying because every single component is either insufficient for even the most basic tasks, plagued with driver bugs, or failed unusually quickly), which did have some BIOS updates released after Ivy Bridge. However, I doubt that they added Ivy Bridge support. This was when Toshiba changed their business model from having some of the best laptops (except for that model with capacitor failures that resulted in people blindly replacing every NEC/Tokin cap they saw instead of troubleshooting) to racing HP and Acer to the bottom. Toshiba and HP even used nearly identical Quanta platforms (slightly different motherboards, but the same exterior design, right down to the port placement).

I got the screen tearing fix completely wrong. The xorg.conf I backed up from 18.04 was just switching the graphics driver to intel instead of modesetting, and the AccelMode line was commented out. That somehow worked. In 22.04, I had to enable TearFree. It seems like there's some microstutter now, but it's still better than Windows, even without hardware video decoding. My comparison to Windows is probably a little unfair since I haven't done much web browsing on that laptop under Windows in almost five years. Since I got my current desktop, I only booted that laptop into Windows to run a video capture device, and that stopped working around the summer of 2020 (when society finished collapsing into petty fighting, hate, and name-calling, but that's another subject). I still haven't figured out what happened to USB on that laptop. Even file transfers to a flash drive or external hard drive peak at 10MB/s.

Trying to preserve a Windows 7 Steam install before we get excommunicated.
Tossed a spare hard drive into my Win7 machine. Copied an old disk image to it that has Test Drive Unlimited 2 working (which is an abandoned game with limited activations, which I doubt can be installed anymore).
Discovered I can only run that game using the existing local user account that it was installed with - when I made a new user account, the game wanted to reactivate. That's annoying, I had wanted to delete that user.

Updated Steam and installed (nearly) every game in my library.
Ran them all once to make sure they finished installing and work.

Next I need to put Steam into Offline mode and research a bit, because I vaguely remember something about an .ini file that should be changed to keep it permanently Offline.
Then zero out the empty disk space, and make a compressed disk image to save forever.

This garbage is why I like GoG.

I broke my Linux Mint VM by simply maximizing the window. Now I just get a black screen with a mouse cursor. VirtualBox is great.

Updated the UEFI on my daily driver and upgraded to Mint 21.2

Setup a ESX dietpi + pihole VM
Removed Supermicro SATA DOM from ESX server. Server used to boot TrueNAS from it but then I switched to booting via ESX and used it for passthru for booting TrueNAS. I had thought I had switched TrueNAS to a vmdk but for the past few months I've been unable to upgrade TrueNAS within the GUI.....turns out it's been trying to upgrade the SATA DOM since it decided that was the boot pool. So ripped it out and everything is good.
Upgraded ESX from 8.0U1 to 8.0.2 via ESXCLI.

shamino wrote on 2023-12-30, 22:41:

Trying to preserve a Windows 7 Steam install before we get excommunicated. Tossed a spare hard drive into my Win7 machine. Copi […]
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Trying to preserve a Windows 7 Steam install before we get excommunicated.
Tossed a spare hard drive into my Win7 machine. Copied an old disk image to it that has Test Drive Unlimited 2 working (which is an abandoned game with limited activations, which I doubt can be installed anymore).
Discovered I can only run that game using the existing local user account that it was installed with - when I made a new user account, the game wanted to reactivate. That's annoying, I had wanted to delete that user.

Updated Steam and installed (nearly) every game in my library.
Ran them all once to make sure they finished installing and work.

Next I need to put Steam into Offline mode and research a bit, because I vaguely remember something about an .ini file that should be changed to keep it permanently Offline.
Then zero out the empty disk space, and make a compressed disk image to save forever.

This garbage is why I like GoG.

Valve needs to make a legacy client that only connects to your library and doesnt require a web browser to work.

lti wrote on 2023-12-31, 03:16:

I broke my Linux Mint VM by simply maximizing the window. Now I just get a black screen with a mouse cursor. VirtualBox is great.

That'll teach you.

I built myself a new system for the first time in over 10 years. Granted, I've built plenty of systems for others and my son over that time. For myself, I tend to be a tightwad and like to use refurbs and stretch performance of old hardware, so this was a nice treat. I'm back in modern times now with a Z690 mobo, i5-12600KF, 32GB DDR5, RTX-2080, and Samsung 980 Pro m.2 1TB. May it last another 10+ years.

clueless1 wrote on 2024-01-01, 10:53:

I built myself a new system for the first time in over 10 years. Granted, I've built plenty of systems for others and my son over that time. For myself, I tend to be a tightwad and like to use refurbs and stretch performance of old hardware, so this was a nice treat. I'm back in modern times now with a Z690 mobo, i5-12600KF, 32GB DDR5, RTX-2080, and Samsung 980 Pro m.2 1TB. May it last another 10+ years.

Good for you on this. But RTX 2080 will hold you back in raytracing but killer on regular graphics but 8GB is the issue. Raytracing is VRAM hog and 2080 is early one. GTX 1080 already have 8GB and cheaper, Titans too expensive for their age except excellent VRAM size. Does not make sense. I had seen comments and reviews on this on GPU forums.

I find the maxed out computers will reach that goal. Especially memory and CPU. Very recent i5 is more like i7 in cores but not quite same due to crippled cache subsystems to sentimentalize the processors which intel is famous for. Most of i7 and Xeons (full featured silicon) performs properly.

Mine:
Starting with C2D E8600 and later computers using Xeon or i7 for daily driver lasted 7 years on average then get replaced. And they were used computers when purchased then upgraded just right after as monthly budget allows.

Cheers,

About every once or twice a year steam in Linux misbehaves in a VM, either I can't start it or games can't download or update. The last occurrence was several months ago and I was fed up and decided to wait a couple of months. The latest occurrence was two-fold:
When Steam went to requiring graphics acceleration by default (idiots) then you can: Install Steam, Login to steam but cannot load the steam GUI. You need to launch Steam from the terminal with the "-cef-disable-gpu" switch and then disable GPU acceleration in the Steam GUI (or passthru a GPU and navigate on a physical monitor). I access this VM via a ESX remote console so disabling is the best bet. A launcher requiring a GPU with no fallback is yet more idiocy and MESA not even working to load Steam is double the idiocy.
The next issue was steam not downloading or updating games. The last time this happened with SMB I reverted to a bhyve VM and local storage but when I moved away from crap bhyve to vmware then I went back to SMB which still didn't work so I moved to NFS which worked....until it didn't. The latest occurence caused steam to not download anywhere (Local,SMB,ISCSI,NFS) and I could never figure it out until I realized that Steam under fedora was flatpak (when I created a new fedora game vm) and even though you could tell Steam to download anywhere and it would let you (ridiculous) you still wouldn't be able to download where you want since you'd receive weird error messages that lead you to troubleshot somewhere else. Instead of dealing with flatpak steam and flatseal or CLI exceptions that may not work with where I want to download I reverted to Steam w/ NFS and I'm downloading again.
Meanwhile out of all the shit game launchers (and I have all of them installed in a VM) Windows steam has never given me any issues....

It'll be interesting to see how Linux Steam craps out in the coming year heh.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2024-01-01, 19:14:

Good for you on this. But RTX 2080 will hold you back in raytracing but killer on regular graphics but 8GB is the issue. Rayt […]
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clueless1 wrote on 2024-01-01, 10:53:

I built myself a new system for the first time in over 10 years. Granted, I've built plenty of systems for others and my son over that time. For myself, I tend to be a tightwad and like to use refurbs and stretch performance of old hardware, so this was a nice treat. I'm back in modern times now with a Z690 mobo, i5-12600KF, 32GB DDR5, RTX-2080, and Samsung 980 Pro m.2 1TB. May it last another 10+ years.

Good for you on this. But RTX 2080 will hold you back in raytracing but killer on regular graphics but 8GB is the issue. Raytracing is VRAM hog and 2080 is early one. GTX 1080 already have 8GB and cheaper, Titans too expensive for their age except excellent VRAM size. Does not make sense. I had seen comments and reviews on this on GPU forums.

I find the maxed out computers will reach that goal. Especially memory and CPU. Very recent i5 is more like i7 in cores but not quite same due to crippled cache subsystems to sentimentalize the processors which intel is famous for. Most of i7 and Xeons (full featured silicon) performs properly.

Mine:
Starting with C2D E8600 and later computers using Xeon or i7 for daily driver lasted 7 years on average then get replaced. And they were used computers when purchased then upgraded just right after as monthly budget allows.

Cheers,

Happy New Year. To be clear, I did not buy the RTX 2080 with this system. It was a GPU I already owned (and it was given to me by a friend for the cost of shipping). 8GB will not be an issue in my case as I game at 1080p. And I really don't own or play an Raytracing games, other than Quake II RTX. I do own Control, but I have not installed or tried to play it yet. I got it free on a giveaway.

The system I upgraded from was an i7-4790K / RTX 2060 / 32GB DDR3 (which I still own and will repurpose).

I'm fine with that for free.

Cheers,

Lately I'm trying a Raspberry Pi 5 in the 8GB DDR4 version. It has its 5V-5A power supply but without external USB devices the watts required are similar to other Celeron mini-pc. On the speed side the CPU seems fast enough but I'd say that these solutions still suffer when used as a low end desktop replacement mostly for the GUI performances even with the official LXDE based GUI. I was expecting a bit more but still good.

When Steam required graphics acceleration by default last year I was unable to use Steam in a macos VM (with an AMD processor) any longer so was unable to download macos Steam games. Tried alternatives since that time but they were too cumbersome finally went with this method which I've finished testing today:
1. Load Steam in console mode in a Windows VM
2. Enter the commands for macos as a platform
3. Enable Steam public profile and use a 3rd party site to export a list of steam games.
4. Set steam profile back to private.
5. In steam collections search for each game from the list and install.

So if I'm ever in a situation where someone puts a gun to my head and forces me to use macos for gaming for the few games on Steam it supports I'll be ready....again.

Bought a 64GB flash memory stick from aliexpress. It was damn cheap (about 4€) so i half-expected it to be fake. It arrived and disconnected from computer every time i tried to write more than 64MB on it.

I have another 64GB stick from aliexpress, that is good. But its case was very soft metal that bent and broke apart in all places.

So now that i got my refund on the fake one, i transplanted the good 64GB stick's internals into the fake's case. (Which is better, more solid metal)

Got at least some benefit out of this mess. 😀 (Made pictures, videos, had to justify multiple times to aliexpress that it is obviously a scam memorystick, etc.)

Upgraded my unsupported hardware and VMs from Windows 11 22H2 to 23H2 via "setup /product server". No issues. 😀
No crashes and no issues with updates since release on 2021.