Category Archives: Computers

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Yes, the Dell Compellent SC220 Chassis AND Drives are Generic!

  By Scott • 2019-01-18 ,
The Compellent SC220 is the disk set on top, followed by an HP D2700, an HP MSA 70, and a Dell MD1220.

I found a great deal on eBay. A Dell Compellent SC220 chassis filled with 24 x 600GB 10K SAS disks for $350 including shipping. Obviously if you’re reading this years later that will seem like a terrible price, but as of now 600GB SAS drives are selling for about $30 each (used). So it’s roughly $720 worth of drives alone. The SC220 is basically an MD1220 in sheep’s clothing (though sheep are generally naked so who knows), and those are selling for about $120. Like I said, a great deal! But there was one question that needed answering: Did the Dell-branded Compellent HDDs have some kind of special firmware that rendered them useless with a standard RAID or JBOD controller? … Continue reading

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Apparently myisamchk Doesn’t Understand 2-Digit Numbers (MySQL)

  By Scott • 2018-02-13
MySql Logo

myisamchk If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’re trying to run myisamchk on a large table and you want to set the –sort_buffer_size to some large value. That’s advisable, of course. However, it seems that some versions of MySQL don’t understand a 2-digit value for that parameter. I was trying to do the following: myisamchk -f -r –update-state –key_buffer_size=4G –sort_buffer_size=16G –read_buffer_size=32M –write_buffer_size=32M /var/sql/myisam-temp/mastersitedb/applicants_master_search – recovering (with sort) MyISAM-table ‘/var/sql/myisam-temp/mastersitedb/applicants_master_search’ Data records: 0 – Fixing index 1 myisamchk: error: myisam_sort_buffer_size is too small MyISAM-table ‘/var/sql/myisam-temp/mastersitedb/applicants_master_search’ is not fixed because of errors Try fixing it by using the –safe-recover (-o), the –force (-f) option or by not using the –quick (-q) flag If you’re getting an error like that, try using … Continue reading

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Disregard: Sealed Lead Acid Battery Longevity Log

  By Scott • 2017-12-11
PowerPatrol_SLA_Batteries_from_Amazon_2

Edit: ACTUALLY, NEVERMIND It’s now June of 2020, and I figure it’s time to put a big “disregard” in the title of this post. While my objectives were indeed grand, there’s a fundamental flaw in my methodology: Most of the UPSes in question do not perform battery self-tests. As such, I really only find out about bad batteries when there’s an actual power failure. And those happen very inconsistently, and infrequently. (Which is good for me overall, but bad for this “log”.) For example, my power just flickered briefly and one UPS shut down as soon as the power went off. The batteries were dated as replaced on 2017-12-10. However, that UPS survived the last power outage some months ago, … Continue reading

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Amazon Echo Look – Teardown

  By Scott • 2017-11-04 ,
Amazon Look - Teardown - All Parts - Top - YouTube Cover - Attempt 01 - 1080p

The Echo Look I’m working on a full review-type-thing of the Look, but who really cares about that? I’m sure people will want to see the insides of it, though. The most interesting two things on it are an Intel RealSense SR300 module (minus its visible light camera), and what’s basically a full Intel PC motherboard. In fact, here are the main specs: Intel Atom x5-Z8350 (SR2KT) @ 1.44Ghz (1.91Ghz burst) 8GB Samsung eMMC Flash NAND Storage 8GB Elpida LPDDR3 RAM Broadcom 802.11ac + 802.11b/g/a/n + Bluetooth (Not sure of the version) The hardware is fantastically made and well put together, and overall is very clever considering they stuffed all of it into a diminutive cylinder! The Reassembly I did … Continue reading

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ZeroFiller: Nearly Fill Up a Disk with Zeroes for Snapshot Backups

  By Scott • 2017-10-23
ZeroFiller - Some Source Code - Screenshot

ZeroFiller (for Windows!) This might be a relatively niche utility, but I figured I’d share it because it might help someone in the same situation. File Version Description ZeroFiller-v0.8-20171023.zip v0.8a2017-10-23 The ZeroFiller executable only (requires .NET 4.5.2) ZeroFiller-src-0.8a-20171023.zip v0.8a2017-10-23 The ZeroFiller source code (requires >= Visual Studio 2017, probably) Backups I run a lot of VMs and I’m a bit obsessed with backups. I do high-level backups (meaning files, DB data, configs, etc.), as well as low-level backups of the actual VM disk images. The raw virtual disks get snapshotted on the host system, then the snapshot’s raw data is backed up using dd, gzip, and rsync. It’s not fancy, and it basically grabs the machine in a crashed state … Continue reading

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Enterprise Network Switches for the Home: Ramble feat HP Procurve 5406ZL

Video

  By Scott • 2017-09-25 , , ,

The HP Procurve 5406ZL and…

…a whole lot of other crap, vis a vis my opinions on used enterprise-grade networking hardware for the home (or small-ish business).

I purchased an HP Procurve 5406ZL on eBay mainly because I “need” 10GbE on my home network, which is almost recursive because it’s for editing 4K video, which I need for editing this video.

The bottom line for me is that you can’t beat the feature/price ratio when it comes to equipment like this. That is, if you can afford the resultant power bill.

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Razer DeathAdder Button Swap (Left- to Right-Handed Mouse)

  By Scott • 2016-09-11 , ,
Razer DeathAdder Button Swap

I’m a leftie, but all my life I’ve used right-handed mice in my left hand. I needed to replace my old Microsoft Optical Mouse, and found the DeathAdder Left-Handed Edition. It’s the perfect size and shape for me, but they did the weird thing of switching the left- and right-click buttons. It’s easy enough in most any operating system to swap the buttons in settings. However — at least with Windows — the buttons are only changed locally. So when connecting to other hosts via Remote Desktop the buttons revert to their hardware configuration. That’s a no-go for me, but I liked the mouse so much that I decided to mod the hardware instead. Fortunately, it’s very easy to reconfigure … Continue reading

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Choosing a Disk Drive: HDDs, SSDs, and Then Some

Video

  By Scott • 2016-06-09 ,

This video covers almost everything you need to know about HDDs and SSDs to make an educated choice before pulling the trigger on a purchase.

Well, almost everything. This video is primarily directed at the home user trying to get some additional storage, whether that be an extra drive in their workstation, a NAS, or a full file server. If you’re trying to choose between SAS drives for a large-scale datacenter installation, then you probably know this stuff already.

As I promised in the video, here’s some links to my HDD TCO worksheet from 2013 (though I may have updated it in the interim with a couple of “new” drives). Please download the Excel version and use this for any drive that you want. If you make any interesting changes or large scale updates, I’d love to see it, so please let me know!

I also added a bunch of notes so you know what I meant with all the field names.

HDD Total Cost of Ownership Worksheet (Google Sheets – View only)

HDD Total Cost of Ownership Worksheet (Excel – View and edit)

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Let’s Open: Intel Mini PC G2 (from AliExpress)

Video

  By Scott • 2016-04-24 , ,

This video features a review and teardown of the Intel Mini PC G2 manufactured by — uhhh — Random Chinese Company 5000.

Did it ship with tons of bloatware and malware? Is it too good to be true that it comes with a full copy of Windows 10? Are the specs worth a damn in the real world? Watch me ramble on about it to find out!

If you want to buy this cylindrical masterpiece mediocrity, a link to the original AliExpress listing is below (which may be way out of date by the time you read this). Note that this is not an endorsement and I don’t receive one penny if you do end up buying it.

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/In-stock-High-Quality-Windows-10-MINI-PC-Host-32G-Memory-Bay-Trail-CR-2-4G/32596403800.html

Not every product from China is crap, but in the “Let’s Open” series I’m buying stuff that seems really good on paper, but has a whiff of the toilet about it.

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FreeNAS Fibre Channel LUN Error / Timeout

  By Scott • 2016-02-28
FreeNAS Server - Fibre Connections (Ethernet and FC)

TL;DR I’m a bit long winded, I know. If you’re pulling your hair out, scroll right down to the solution (which of course may or may not match your actual problem). Background I’m posting this because there is very little information on Google regarding these particular error messages, and I’m hoping that this will help point you in the right direction if you’re having the same issue. I have a new FreeNAS server that’s going to be serving my home network via SMB / NFS, but I also wanted to give my dev and production environments access to its main storage pool for non-critical file systems (backup staging, test environments, etc). My TCP/IP networks (home/dev/prod/management) are rigorously firewalled off from … Continue reading