Diary

• May 29, 2024
  
  • depot
    depot is now running FreeBSD 13.3-STABLE.

• May 28, 2024
  
  • pi gang
    grover, lassie, nomnom and snoopy (Raspberry Pi 4's) are now running Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm). Sadly this doesn't get me what I really want (decent C++20 support), since Debian and derivatives are perpetually years behind. So this is just temporary for now. I'll likely migrate two of these Pis to FreeBSD, and one to a Linux distro that's more amenable to modern C++ development, leaving only one of them running the 'official' Raspberry Pi OS.

• May 3, 2024
  
  • ria
    ria is now running FreeBSD 13.3-STABLE.

• kiva
  kiva is now running FreeBSD 13.3-STABLE.

• February 23, 2024
  
  • thrip
    I topped off the water in thrip, since small amounts get lost to very slight evaporative loss over time (years). I also cleaned all of the air filters, and blasted out all of the dust with a blow gun in the driveway.

• December 16, 2023
  
  • www
    I am in the process of updating from FreeBSD 12.4-STABLE to 13.2-STABLE. It's overdue. The package work is not going to be trivial, but I'll get through it. I've kicked off 'make buildworld'.

    As for what prompted it now... I now need C++20 support for libDwm, and would prefer to get it via the base clang++ compiler and libc++ versus the alternatives. I've been making some changes to libDwm that require C++20 (for concepts).

• October 21, 2023
  
  • spark
    I finally got around to updating my MacPorts installation to match MacOS Sonoma 14.0. In the process I updated XCode to 15.0, along with the XCode Command Line Tools.

    I'm still waiting for restore_ports.tcl to complete.

• September 16, 2023
  
  • spark
    I updated spark to MacOS Sonoma 14.0.

• August 12, 2023
  
  • pi1
    In order to fully test a Raspberry Pi 4B as a replacement for my Raspberry Pi 2B for micpigdo (my garage door opener), I put an original PoE HAT on pi4c while I wait for PoE splitters to arrive from Amazon. The goal of today's simple testing is to see if my device driver and micpigdo changes work beyond unit tests. i.e. today's testing is with hardware in the loop.

    pi4c was running gentoo linux. I'm not going to reimage its microSD card, but instead just swap in a card that's a copy of toto, which I've been using for the porting and testing work. The OS here is FreeBSD 13.2-STABLE.

    Interestingly, this doesn't work. Despite being fine when I kldload my driver without my mcpigdo HAT connected, I get a hang from kldload with my mcpigdo HAT connected. I suspect there is a power issue here with the original PoE HAT.

• August 11, 2023
  
  • pi1
    I ordered a pair of PoE splitters from Amazon. Power output is USB-C, which is what I will need if I replace pi1 with a Raspberry Pi 4B.

• August 10, 2023
  
  • thrip
    Last month I created a 4-wide striped volume of Samsung 990 Pro 2TB NVMe on thrip just for fun. They're all on an Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen4 PCIe card. I created an ext4 filesytem over the striped volume. A read test yielded more than 24 gigabytes/second. A write test yielded more than 13 gigabytes/second. Nice. Of course, not a recommended configuration for anything but scratch space.

    Tonight I finally got around to updating the firmware on the 990 Pros. Despite ordering all at once from the same place on the same order, two arrived with current firmware and two with old firmware. Since Samsung released the 990 Pro with a firmware issue that rapidly incremented the device wear indicator, I needed to get this done. They're all now running 3B2QJXD7.

• August 1, 2023
  
  • pi1
    

    I've been plugging away at tinkering with updating my garage door opener setup. It was running FreeBSD 11.0-ALPHA5 on a Raspberry Pi 2B. Fun fact: make -j3 world of FreeBSD 13.2-STABLE on a Raspberry Pi 2B takes roughly 7 days. While it is sometimes I/O bound, this is mostly about CPU, and RAM. make -j4 buildworld isn't usable because at some point there will be 4 c++ compiler instances running at once with a large enough memory footprint to far exceed available RAM (1 gigabyte on the Raspberry Pi 2B). Swapping to a high-endurance microSD card pretty much means game over, and even my make -j3 is kind of a gamble.

    I am considering a Raspberry Pi 4B with 4G of RAM as a replacement. While the in-use task here doesn't require the oomph, I can't buy a new Raspberry Pi 2B today and hence it's a dead end to keep using it. And the reality is that things like OS updates go faster with a bit more oomph and network bandwidth (1G versus 100M ethernet). The downside of the Pi 4B is more power consumption (and heat), and the fact that I'll want a new PoE splitter. I explored three different PoE HATs, but am not happy with any of them for this use (in a ventless enclosure); they all have fans and seem to need them from my testing. So I'd rather continue to use a separate splitter that's easier to replace as needed. But I need one with USB-C. I have one in my Amazon cart.

    mcpigdo appears to work on a Raspberry Pi 4B (unit tests pass) with FreeBSD 13.2-STABLE. It has been refactored to use libDwmCredence (versus the deprecated libDwmAuth), which addresses one DoS issue in libDwmAuth but more importantly for micpogdo is that libDwmCredence uses libsodium versus libDwmAuth's use of Crypto++. mcpogdo was my last application suite using libDwmAuth and Crypto++. I was maintaining my own private fork of Crypto++ due to the maintainers never fixing an issue I reported and provided a patch to resolve. It's kinda sad, really, since there was a time when Crypto++ was reliable and modern. That time passed years ago and I've been slow to get to this final step in moving on.

    Worth noting that I don't often build FreeBSD for the Pi on the Pi itself since cross-builds work fine. However, it's useful to me to be able to compile my own software on the Pi itself, if mostly to be able to gauge what someone else might experience.

    I still need to create a patch file for the kernel to include my gpiorotenc driver.

• July 12, 2023
  
  • thrip
    I finally ordered some M.2 NVMe to populate the Hyper M.2 X16 Gen4 card I bought years ago. I was waiting for Samsung 4TB, but it hasn't happened. Instead I bought four Samsung 990 PRO 2TB, on Prime Day (good deal). This will allow me to make more thorough use of thrip as a VM host, and experiment with ZFS on linux. Right now I have Ubuntu as my host OS and a single Windows 10 VM (via virtualbox). I'd like to have a FreeBSD 13-STABLE VM for development purposes. While kiva has 12 cores, they're L5640 and hence slow compared to 12 cores of the Threadripper 3960X. Not to mention that the I/O on kiva is an order of magnitude slower (no NVMe) and kiva only has 48G of RAM versus the 256G of RAM in thrip.

• June 22, 2023
  
  • UPS
    I again put off buying a new UPS for my office, and once again installed new batteries in my old Fortress 1425. It's been close to 3 years since I last replaced them. The front panel of the UPS was indicating a battery test failure.

• May 21, 2023
  
  • ria
    ria is now running FreeBSD 13.2-STABLE.

• May 13, 2023
  
  • depot
    depot is now running FreeBSD 12.4-STABLE.

• May 10, 2023
  
  • kiva
    kiva is now running FreeBSD 12.4-STABLE.

• April 27, 2023
  
  • ria
    ria is now running FreeBSD 12.4-STABLE.

• May 23, 2022
  
  • network
    My last old Powerware 5115RM died last night. It is in the basement rack, and is used for kiva. It is 20 years old, so I can't really complain. And thankfully, mcrover (my monitoring software) noticed it and posted an alert. Else I might not have noticed until the next power outage. I can't hear the UPS' audible alarm if I'm not in the basement.

    This was a strange death. The UPS alarm is continuous (not beeping), but the front LED indicators are normal. However, I can't talk to it over the serial connection (hence the mcrover alert).

    I ordered a second Eaton 5PX1500RT to replace it. I looked at the newest 5PX G2, but I wanted an exact match and I already have an Eaton 5PX1500RT in the basement rack. The new one will just get racked on top of the existing one.

    The main advantage of the newer 5PX G2 is that it's quieter and shallower. It also has a nicer display, but I don't need a nicer display. When it comes time to replace the ancient (25+ years?) Best Fortress 1425 in my office, I'll probably get the 5PX G2 for the lower noise and shallower depth than the 5PX. And I suspect Eaton will stop building the 5PX.

    I do wish that Eaton would put a 5PX in a 4U enclosure, just to allow 120mmx38mm fans, potentially very quiet. I realize that the primary market at this price point cares about rack density, but there is a growing number of us that need this level of infrastructure at home(COVID pandemic, anyone?). And noise matters at home.

    I'ts a bit painful buying quality UPS. I could have bought a CyberPower for a few hundred less. But my experience tells me that I generally don't want UPS to be something I need to upgrade; I want to use it until it dies. I want minimal maintenance, namely battery replacements. It should just work for a long time. It's the whole point: minimze unplanned downtime (ride out short power outages). In my area, power hiccups are not rare; I see at least a few each week on average.

    Buy once, cry once.

• July 18, 2021
  
  • office
    I continue to get some flack over my plan to move my office to the den. It's comical, given that I don't have a long-term plan, nor a decor theme in mind. Sort of like paper tigers arguing hypotheticals. Especially since the planned move isn't about where I want to work; it's about getting my office out of the room that needs flooring, trim and paint while not totally disrupting my ability to work at home. Nevermind the fact that it's my house, my time, my money, and hence my plan. I'm going to do what I need to do to reach the goal of completing the second floor remodelling.

    I've been doing what I do for more than three decades, and much of it at home. I know exactly what I need in my home office space at any given point. Saying things like, "You're going to put all that computer stuff in there?!" is willful ignorance (in the dictionary sense of the word). I dismiss it as such. If you don't want to know what I need or why, there's no constructive discussion to be had.

    A funny thing is that the computing stuff I could do without is the stuff most people really want; streaming devices and gaming machines. I might play 10 minutes of computer pinball once every 3 months. Ditto for television.

    I have quite a bit more bigger computing stuff than someone whose livelihood doesn't depend on it. But most of it isn't in living space; it's in racks in the basement. The basic needs haven't changed for my whole career: workstation, laptop, UPS, robust backups, fast and reliable network connections, a networked printer. Some things come and go, and some things get upgraded (technology moves at a blistering pace and it's not optional for me to keep up). I don't buy computing stuff based on want very often; nearly all of it is based on need.

    One of the interesting things that has happened over time is the diversification of computing. Today, your average worker doesn't need a workstation; their laptop is more than sufficient for their computing. They might need an external monitor, keyboard and mouse to be at their highest productivity, but their laptop easily meets their core needs. For another large set of people, a tablet meets their needs (a current iPad Pro is significantly faster than any laptop of just a few years ago). I know these people, as do you... they're the majority (by far). It has nothing to do with any sort of tech savvy. it's just the fact that the market has been able to outpace the average user's needs with smaller, portable devices. But there remains a minority of us who create these devices and many other things in the modern world, who still need workstations, servers, etc. And whose entire life's work is purely digital artifacts. I'm in this camp. And it's funny... workstation and desktop sales haven't dropped off (hello, we're still here :)), it's just that mobile has outpaced it. PC sales were roughly 300 million units in 2020. A workstation and some surrounding infrastructure isn't optional for me (if it were, I wouldn't own it). When your life's work is something you can't physically touch, smell or feel, it's easy to be careless, and as a consequence, lose everything in a single, predictable and inevitable failure. Or just lose a month's worth of work (big $$$). Spinning rust (disk drive) tends to fail catastrophically if not monitored and replaced. When solid state storage fails, it's typically even worse. I'm a professional; I do what's necessary to avoid inevitable, preventable failures. Almost all of my infrastructure at home is about keeping robust backups for all of my work. Every piece of software I've written outside of work is automatically backed up over the network every night. As is everything I need to quickly recover from any storage failure at home. If you don't have unattended backups of your work, you're either not a professional (i.e. no one suffers but you if a storage failure occurs) or you're living VERY dangerously. This is one of today's foundations of being a software developer, creative artist (photography, film, music, digital art), engineer, writer, et. al.. If your work is all in one place and one place only, and that place is of a lifespan known with certainty to be MUCH shorter than the average human lifespan... you're literally begging for a traumatic life-changing event. I bemoan this as much as anyone, but I also acknowledge and address it as the reality. I am prepared for most of the inevitable (storage and other computer failures) here.

    There's also the reality that some of my stuff isn't significantly different than hundreds of millions of other homes. My smartphone is on the net. So is my watch, my iPad, my laptop, my Android TV, my Roku TV, my Apple TV, the PS/4, my thermostat, all of my smoke/CO alarms, printers, my garage door opener... none of them atypical in a modern (post-2000) home. Reality... for most consumers, all of these devices are under 24-hour attack from the outside, each and every day. It's invisible to most people until they get hit with something that demands their attention (ransomware, for example). It's not invisible to me, and my network is hence robustly protected from the Internet. This means hardware and software dedicated to keeping my network safe. It's not optional for me any more than it would be for a large enterprise. I can't choose to fly by the seat of my pants without incurring very significant risk. I need to access my home network from outside my home on a regular basis, which means I have to be just as careful as any other business with remote access. And my setup is more secure than most I've seen in enterprise space, in part because I understand it deeply but mostly because my attack surface can be kept quite small. It's much smaller than the average residential consumer with PnP enabled on their gateway. It's a sad reality that most people have no idea how vulnerable they are to network attacks. We're in this weird place where "That only happens to other people and big businesses" is a common thought despite it being far from reality. If you're on a battlefield with dense scatterfire everywhere, it should not be comforting to think, "There are more desirable targets.". The attackers don't think that way, and most are completely unaware of the worth of their target until after they've penetrated the target's defenses. They kill all the targets and don't know their worth until they've cleaned the victims' pockets.

    A very long time ago, I was a victim of credit card fraud. To this day I'm not certain how the attacker got my credit card number. I assumed an insecure HTTP transaction of some kind (it was still the early days of the Web... 1998). But even afterward, they were completely oblivious to who they'd attacked; they didn't care. They had attacked my ssh1 gateway via a zero-day vulnerability. Sadly for them, they set up a tiny IRC server on my gateway which I found quickly (tripwire). I was able to monitor their chat (in Russian), then shut it down after collecting IRC handles and IP addresses. And... restore from a clean backup (which I believe was a Zip drive) and disable sshd (I still had Kerberos). What the attacker apparently didn't know was that I was a network researcher, for a group with live fiber taps at all of the major U.S. exchanges. So we decided it'd be an interesting sleuthing activity to see what we could ascertain from sampled data at the exchanges. Just IP addresses, from which I was able to find the attacker's mail server, ftp server and web server. From there I was able to get the name and many photos of the actual attacker, a Russian teenager. All from his public ftp server and web server. When I provided this information to the FBI, they were understandably clueless; they were not Internet-savvy yet. It didn't matter much anyway; the FBI's jurisdiction doesn't cross borders.

    Things haven't changed for the better here. There are more of us to target and the average consumer is more vulnerable to attack than the average Web user was in 1998. The primary reason: a much larger attack surface (many more devices).

    Long story short... I'm happy to make compromises. And I want the den to look as nice as possible. But there are some things for which I can't compromise because the risk to my livelihood is very real. So as long as I'm in a spot where the den is the only place in the house I can work from effectively while remodelling other rooms, it will have what I need in it. Elegance is of lower priority right now.

• July 17, 2021
  
  • office
    I ordered a second Antlion Uni headset microphone. I've been happy with my first one, on my AKG K371S headphones. This second one will go on one of my AKG K271 MKII headphone sets. I'm mostly indifferent to which headphones I'm using between the two, so this will allow Julie to choose which headset she wants to use when recording lectures, having Zoom meetings, etc. and I'll use the other. I have a slight preference for the K271 MKII for long periods of music listening, but as near as I can tell, it's just a comfort thing on my head and not a sound quality thing.

    I botched my Sweetwater order in one spot: I meant to order 2 Rode phantom 48V to 4V adapters, but I only ordered one. This might be a good thing, since I now see a review mentioning a 170Hz hum. I'll test the one I ordered before ordering another. Of course, most of the ones I've seen available don't appear to have good build quality (PCB held in place just be soldering the XLR pins to solder pads on the PCB, etc.). Since I'm already suffering from the poor build quality of the microphone and headphone jacks on my PC, I'd prefer to avoid poor build quality here.

    I get it. But no one knows what I want to do; I don't know, so how could anyone else know? All I really know is my basic needs. It's not like I haven't put thought into this; my career spans more than three decades and I'm passionate about my work. Much of what I use has not changed significantly. Some needs don't go away; UPS, for example. My Internet doesn't go away during a power outage (unless it lasts more than 45 minutes). In fact none of my computing goes away. That's important to me and has been for 30 years. On the other hand, some things have changed significantly. Way back when, I had one device on the Internet (my workstation). First via modem, then via ISDN. Later I had a few workstations, via T1. Then broadband and multiple devices. Today... I don't actually have a count, but let's just say my network no longer fits in a /25 prefix; there are more than 64 devices on my home network at some point or another. And if you work in technology, thjis isn't crazy. Think about it. My watch is on the WiFi (and cellular). So is my smartphone. So is my iPad. My Rokus, my Apple TV, my Android TV, my thermostat, my smoke/C02 alarms, my garage door opener... the list just keeps growing. I've had to upgrade the network as time has progressed, in order to use the technology to my advantage. But not for these devices, for the most part. The significant network upgrades have been for my work, not my convenience or leisure. I need my source code repositories to be fast. And I need them to be backed up, rigourously and robustly. They hold much of my life's work, and I refer to it many many times a day.

    I don't have all my computing gear in the office. What can be racked in the basement, outside of living space, is in fact racked in the basement. My gateway/firewall, my web server, my backup hosts, the main 48-port 1 gigabit PoE switch for networking and power throughout the house, the 16-port 10 gigabit switch for high speed from important hosts (workstations, laptops, backup hosts, web server, gateway/firewall), UPS, cable modem, patch panels. It's not pretty in the basement, but it's quite tidy. My basement is unfinished, and a ceiling would hide everything I've done.

    The handful of uglies I need in my office space: my desktop computer/monitor/keyboard/trackpad. My laptop, though 99% of the time I use it in clamshell mode. The Threadripper 3960X workstation (thrip), because it's far and away the fastest machine in the house and hence I use it every day for my work. A 10 gigabit ethernet switch for high speed connections to the basement (for shared filesystems and backups). UPS to keep my desktop, thrip and ethernet switch from unexpected power-offs. I like having my network printer in my office, but it could definitely be somewhere else.

    So... I need some near-the-floor rack space for UPS and ethernet switch(es). Let's say 12U since that's what I have right now. Let's assume we might need another 2U for another UPS (Eaton 5P shallow model, probably). I'd put that UPS in a separate rack since they're ludicrously heavy (I can't afford lithium ion UPS). So for rack space, let's just assume two 12U racks, the equivalent of two of my existing MDV-R12. This is my best first tack, only because 12U is amenable to under-desk. I don't need a tremendous amount of depth like I need in the basement rack; the UPS is the deepest item, followed by the Middle Atlantic drawers which are 15.5" deep and would be the predominant rack tenant. I already own these drawers. They are mechanically rugged and if you don't hit them with a hammer, they look nice. What I'm tired of is the look of the MDV-R12 racks. They're music studio furniture. I want something of real wood, not laminated MDF. And not held together with fasteners that have to covered up with ugly plastic plugs. And not larger than needed. Two of a custom cabinet (say 24" deep) is likely sufficient. So we're taling about roughly a 20.5" by 24" footprint on the floor for each one. Back to back with some space for cords and ventilation, let's say 20.5" x 54". That could be under a pair of 30" desktop surfaces while being recessed under the desktops by 3". And if I assume the second one has no electronics (all drawers) except for an Eaton 5P1500RC, that one could actually be only 20" deep. But... on top of these I'd like bookshelves. And I'd prefer they were 19" wide by about 12" deep per column, interior dimensions. Two columns would be 40.25" to 41" wide depending on whether or not I made each column standalone. I'd rather go with three, which would be 60" to 61.5" wide. That's a near ideal match for back-to-back 30" desktop surfaces. Why 19" interior width? So I can rackmount the audio gear, and because 19" is pretty standard for a lot of electronic stuff (nearly all home audio gear, for example). I don't expect to have anything beyond some small amount of audio gear racked, so there will only be rack rails at the bottom, presumably the center column. I know I need 4U or 5U, so I bought rails for 6U. The idea in my head at the moment is 6U of rack space at the bottom of the center column for Behringer UMC404HD (my desktop's audio), Behringer UMC204HD (Julie's computer audio), Behringer MDX2600 (one channel for each of us), Behringer FBQ1502HD (one channel for each of us) and Furman power conditioner. I'd like cubbies of about 8U height on each of the left and right columns, with pegs for us to hang headphones/headset, inside the columns (hidden).

    As far as desk surface goes... it's always the more the better, but I need at least 60" width. My monitor is about 36" wide, and these days I can't imagine working with less desktop (I started using dual 24" in the early 1990's, I can't go back to a single small monitor without destroying my productivity). Speakers are roughly 6" wide, so I'm at 48" with just my monitor and small speakers. What I haven't figured out is how much depth I really need. My current desk is much deeper than what I want in the den, but at the same time my comfortable monitor viewing distance says I might need a little more than 30". How do I accomodate? It's food for thought at the moment.

    Then there's the desk(s). I've done quite a bit of looking and haven't really found a good solution off-the-shelf yet. There are some industrial-looking things I like (think steampunk), if I want to go single-surface. They'll accomodate a large top and are height-adjustable (functional industrial crank). But I'm not convinced cosmetically, and I've no idea what Julie might think. And some are ungodly heavy or out of my price range (think tens of thousands of dollars). On the other hand, I could picture a not-ugly decor that would work with it. The Middle Atlantic drawers I have, for example, would match up well if they're in nice wood cabinets. Add a nice globe, maybe a replica antique telescope, a sextant, aviation-inspired chairs, etc. All the bookshelves lined with Julie's books and a few of mine (mainly the Donald Knuth books and a few others). Think cast iron legs but real wood tops. Timeless, durable stuff.

    It's worth noting that I did do some scouring for antique library tables. Unfortunately I haven't hit on anything. Vaunted law libraries aren't abundant. I did find some cast iron legs I like on Etsy. https://www.etsy.com/listing/915643496/28-dining-height-rustic-brown-cast-iron

• July 15, 2021
  
  • office
    As part of my move to the den, I want to reduce my space consumption. I haven't figured out what I'm going to do about a desk yet, but I readily concede that we don't want my Middle Atlantic desk in the den. And speaking for myself, I don't want the Axiom Audio M22 speakers on my desk (they're 20" tall and I never intended them for desktop use... they're just what I had that wasn't being used). The same is true of the old Axiom subwoofer; it's way bigger than I need. I also no longer need some of the things in the 8U of rack space in my desk.

    Of course I still need decent audio. I do listen to music from my computer once in a while, and occassionally even when I'm working (something light that just helps tune out background noises, or a developer podcast). More importantly, as expozed by COVID-19 and work from home, I need a better setup for WebEx, Teams and friends. And I listen to tech podcasts at my desk; things like embedded.fm, Security Now, etc. are more useful to me when I can easily look at the web for references. My main problem of late has been the fact that my old desktop's microphone and headphone jack have already been repaired once but the headphone jack is on the blink yet again. They're poorly made, and I want an external audio device that is built for professional use and not tied to the PC (it can be used with my laptop and any future PC). In addition, the ADC for the microphone isn't great, and the headphone output is pretty much abysmal. I don't want a desktop or boom microphone, I like having the Antlion microphone on my headphones of choice. Not fancy, and has some booming issues as well as handling thumps. But it's easy to move out of sight when I'm not using it, and doesn't clutter my office. Hence I'd like a little bit of processing of the microphone before it gets to my computer, to make up for the unbalanced connection from the micrpohone (hopefully).

    I'm a former sound engineer. For the human voice, to me the minimum processor chain is a gate/compressor/limiter (other features a bonus) and an equalizer. It helps me greatly reduce handling thumps and proximity bias, even out the volume and allows de-essing. These aren't huge dial spins. But when you get it dialed in reasonably well, it's a night and day difference versus no processing.

    My other consideration: my significant other. She works from home more than I do in a normal year, and she needs quiet. So I expect to be wearing headphones more often than I do right now. More importantly, with both of us working in the same space, there will occasionally be conference call conflicts and the like. I need to be able to do what I can to isolate our sounds when necessary. And finally, she records lectures a lot. She's been getting by with the built-in microphone on her old 2013 Macbook Pro, and the microphone array on a newer 16" Intel Macbook Pro is better, but neither provides any real isolation and I consider them last-resort. She hasn't really eperienced the difference between what she's using now and a semi-professional recordgin setup. She might not even notice a big difference. But some of her students most definitely will, and I'd like her to have a similar setup to mine where she doesn't need to open DAW software just to make her voice sound good. Once I dial in the gate/compressor/limiter/de-esser/etc., she won't need to change it. She'll just pick up her headset, adjust one or two knobs (mix and volume), and go.

    So... after a lot of research, I ordered some stuff from Sweetwater. Some PreSonus Eris 3.5" powered monitors (the smallest I could go with decent sound), which are less than half the size of my current speakers and dirt cheap ($99/pair). A matching PreSonus 8" powered subwoofer. So I no longer need a rackmount amplifier. A Behringer MDX2600 compressor/expander/gate/de-esser (1U, 2 channels... one for my microphone, one for my significant other's microphone). A Behringer FBQ1502HD equalizer (1U, 2 channels, 15-band... I'd prefer 31-band, but don't want the space consumption of a 2U equalizer). A Behringer UMC404HD 4x4 USB audio interface at tne center of things... for my microphone, headphones, inserts through the compressor and EQ (only for microphone inpouts), and output to the subwoofer and monitors. I got a UMC204HD for my significant other, which willl also insert through the compressor and equalizer (second channel). Neither of us needs the UMC404HD, but the UMC204HD is bus-powered only. That should work fine from a laptop or any modern PC with good USB-C ports. My PC is very old and already has a lot of USB ports occupied; I'm leery of using another bus-powered device with it. So I got the single UMC404HD mainly to get a device that's not powered from USB.

    I also ordered a Furman power conditioner with pull-out lamps and a rear gooseneck lamp. It's the plainest looking one I could find that has very good power conditioning and protection. It's similar to the one in my UPS and switch rack, it just doesn't have the voltage LEDs. It still has the 133V RMS overvoltage protection that I've found to be fabulous for protecting my gear (it has tripped a few times during storms). No ugly branding logo like my old Stanton units, and the pull-out lights are brighter and don't get hot (they're LED). So technically I can go from 8U of stuff to 3U plus the audio interfaces. For now I've ordered some 6U rails so I can mount things. At the moment I'm not sure what I'll be doing mounting wise, I only know that I don't want it to be an eyesore. I've been thinking one large work surface for myself and my significant other, facing each other, with this stuff to the side of us. Ideally it'd just be integrated into booskshelves and hence inconspicuous. None of this stuff should generate much heat, thankfully. I need to sit down with Shapr3d for a while and come up with something.

    Anyway, I'm sort of excited. For one, I'm tired of fighting with the flaky audio jacks on my PC; the sound interface and processors will solve an immediate problem. I'm tired of having 8U of rack directly in front of me with gear I've had for almost 20 years, including the ART SLA-1 that gets warm/hot (that's with a new fan). I'm tired of having really tall speakers on my desk that aren't intended for near-field listening. I'm tired of having a subwoofer that's bigger than I need. I'm tired of not having decent control of what gets to my PC from my microphone (and yes I use DAW software when I must, but it's dramatic overkill for my daily use).

    The hard part is going to be figuring out how I keep the den from looking like a corporate office. Despite the fact that I don't want my Middle Atlantic desk in visible living space, I can't argue against its utility. A ton of space (84" wide), a huge overbridge, 8U of rack space, mounted power strip, cable routing, modesty panel to hide things... it's been good to have. Not to mention that I have three matching MDV-R12 units. But I don't want it in the den. And my significant other feels even stronger about it, and I don't blame her. But... I have stuff that I need in order to work from home. And I work from home even if I spend full days in the office; I like what I do, it's my primary hobby and not just my profession. My significant other... despite her many hours a day of computer use, her needs are different than mine. She'd love desks that were designed in the pre-computer era (or a cenutry earlier than that) and they'd work for her. And I won't argue with her on the looks; she's right and it's also subjective. But I need to come up with some kind of compromise. The den is the place in the house where I need to be simply because it has 10 gigabit fiber connections to the rack in the basement and it's well-isolated sound-wise from the bedrooms. I don't need to be blasting audio, but I can't give up my loud mechanical keyboards. I also normally have a desktop, a workstation and a laptop that I use daily. While I am hoping to be able to migrate to a Mac Mini soon (I need 64G of RAM so the current M1 Mac Mini doesn't work for me), I'll still need the Threadripper 3960X machine in the office. And it's not small, nor pretty. But it's where I do Windows and Linux work, and where I have a 2080ti GPU that I occasionally need. Not to mention it has 256G of RAM and is easily the fastest machine in the house; it saves me time, sometimes a LOT of time.

    Nothing worth doing is easy.

• October 20, 2020
  
  • thrip
    I gave up on being able to procure an NVIDIA Ampere (3080 or 3090) this calendar year. NVIDIA's launches continue to suck. I actually can't think of a way to make it worse for the consumer or prosumer. Not only can you not buy a card at retail anywhere, more than a month after launch, but you also can't pre-order from any retailer of repute. The only place to get a card is from scalpers on eBay, for 2 to 5 times the retail price. NVIDIA removed the Ampere cards from their own store, and now the only place in North America to buy a Founder's Edition card is BestBuy. You can't place an order there, it just says 'Sold Out' and lets you ask for email notifications. Like I don't already get too much junk email from BestBuy.

    So, back to the chase. I got lucky and found an EVGA RTX 2080 Ti FTW3 Ultra on eBay from a local seller with an EK Quantum Vector FTW3 waterblock pre-installed, with a backplate and still including the stock cooler and fans. It will suit my needs (machine learning) for at least the next year, and since it'll be watercooled I can keep it in thrip even if I later install a big 3-slot card. And none of my money went to NVIDIA, which makes me happy only in the sense that they don't deserve it. Their launches are essentally big money grabs; the dramatic mismatch between supply and demand isn't by accident.

• October 18, 2020
  
  • thrip
    I stripped and then painted the backplate of the RX580 GPU card. This is not the long-term GPU, but for testing purposes I needed a graphics card and this was as inexpensive as I could find while not being crap. I installed it and POST passed. I then installed Xubuntu 20.04 since I wanted something lightweight for hardware ttesting.

    Other than shooting myself in the foot with a typo in the BIOS for RAM timings, the hardware testing has gone well. CPU works, RAM works, NVMe SSD works, video works. And I can't seem to push the CPU beyond 52C or so, even with long blender benchmark runs that peg all cores for many minutes. The CPU cores idle at around 28C, with ambient around 21C. So the cooling solution works great for the CPU. It's yet to be seen what happens when I put a modern GPU in the loop.

• October 17, 2020
  
  • thrip
    I finished leak testing the watercooling loop with just distilled water.

• July 28, 2020
  
  • ria
    ria is now running FreeBSD 11.4-STABLE.

• July 27, 2020
  
  • kiva
    kiva is now running FreeBSD 11.4-STABLE.

• July 7, 2020
  
  • UPS
    I again put off buying a new UPS for my office, and instead installed new batteries in my old Fortress 1425. The front panel of the UPS had been indicating a battery voltage problem. I have a suspicion that it's incorrect, since my meter disagrees; I see 13.3 volts for all of the old batteries. But it's been more than 2 years, and I know they get warm.

• November 16, 2019
  
  • kiva
    The new Ultrastar 10TB drives are working fine, with no errors. These will likely me my go-to drives for a while.

            	NAME              STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
            	zfs1              ONLINE       0     0     0
            	  mirror-0        ONLINE       0     0     0
            	    gpt/gpzfs1_0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            	    gpt/gpzfs1_1  ONLINE       0     0     0
            	  mirror-1        ONLINE       0     0     0
            	    gpt/gpzfs1_2  ONLINE       0     0     0
            	    gpt/gpzfs1_3  ONLINE       0     0     0
            	  mirror-3        ONLINE       0     0     0
            	    gpt/gpzfs1_4  ONLINE       0     0     0
            	    gpt/gpzfs1_5  ONLINE       0     0     0
            
            errors: No known data errors
            

• November 9, 2019
  
  • kiva
    The 8TB Seagate IronWolf Pro drives have a firmware bug that causes problems I'm not willing to tolerate. Seagate released a firmware update to correct the same issue on the 10TB drives, due mostly to complaints from Synology and Synology users (though FreeNAS users had the same complaints). Sadly, Seagate has yet to release fixes for any drives other than the 10TB, and I don't have time to wait. I removed the new vdev with zfs remove zfs1 mirror-2. Fortunately it has a trvial amount of data on it, so it went quickly. I returned the drives to Microcenter today for a refund.

    Years ago I had sworn off Seagate due to some issues we had at work with Barracuda drives. That was a long time ago, but I wish I had kept them off my list. Sadly, Microcenter no longer carries enterprise-grade drives at the local store.

    I'm going with tried-and-true Ultrastar drives. I've used them on and off since the days they were still made by IBM, then later made by Hitachi, then HGST and now Western Digital. Since the real power saving (and HelioSeal) starts with the 10TB model, I'm buying a pair of 10TB. This costs a little bit more money, but gets me about 2TB more space, and a 2.5 million hour MTBF. I might put these in their own pool as a mirrored vdev, to avoid adding another point of failure to the existing pool. If I do this, I'll likely migrate some of my backup datasets to the new mirror.

• November 4, 2019
  
  • kiva
    A pair of 8TB Seagate IronWolf Pro drives have been added to kiva's zfs1 ZFS pool as a mirrored vdev. This gives me some breathing room for TimeMachine backups of my Macbook Pro.

• October 20, 2019
  
  • depot
    depot has been updated to FreeBSD 11.3-STABLE.

• kiva
  kiva has been updated to FreeBSD 11.3-STABLE.

• October 19, 2019
  
  • ria
    ria has been updated to FreeBSD 11.3-STABLE.

• September 1, 2019
  
  • network
    My Unifi controller instance would not start after the power outage last week. mongod would not start, and in fact dumped core on every start. Even when running it with just --repair and path arguments. Sigh, I wish Ubiquiti had chosen a more robust storage scheme. The controller would not load backups either.

    I was forced to wipe everything and start over. I decided tp update openjdk, mongodb and the Unifi controller in the process. I then adopted all of my Ubiquiti Unify devices and updated the firmware on all of them (now at 4.0.54.10625). Everything is working.

• August 31, 2019
  
  • kiva
    I updated plexmediaserver on kiva. This was necessary in order to allow my new TCL 65R615 TV with Roku to access it.

• network
  I moved the patch cable for MB_2 from one of the 10G ports on the basement US-16-XG to a port on the US-48 500W. This port goes to the second port in the master bedroom and is being used for the new TCL 65R615 in the bedroom. The 65R615 doesn't have 10G ethernet, so it makes more sense to have it plugged into a 1G ethernet switch port.

• August 27, 2019
  
  • network
    I received a new Eaton 5PX UPS today from newegg. I racked it, powered it up and plugged ria, www, my ethernet switches and cable modem into it. This replaced my old Powerware 5125 that was starting to have problems. I moved kiva to my old Powerware 5115, so I now have a little better load balancing. And hence I have a bit more runtime on battery; 30 minutes versus 20 minutes. In the end I'd like to also replace my old Powerware 5115 since I've already had one of those die in recent years. But for now I should be in good shape to ride out power glitches.

• May 1, 2019
  
  • office
    The AC Infinity T7-N Cloudplate arrived. As I suspected, it's loud. In fact, any fan setting above 2 (out of 6) is basically unbearable in my office. I disassembled it a bit, and noted that the fans are 25mm deep. In other words, nothing special at all. I will wind up replacing them with Noctua 80mm fans. What I haven't checked is whether or not they're using PWM. It's a bit odd; I would expect PWM fans in this application, yet the fan wires are 3-wire. That would imply that the fans are NOT PWM, since the third wire would be expected to be RPM sensing. Unfortunately I no longer have a working oscilloscope at home to check. For now I'll put the unit in the rack and use it with the fans set to 1 or auto wth a fairly high temperature range. I'll revist once I get a chance to put an oscilloscope on the fan leads to check the pinout.

    The 2U blank plate arrived as well, along with the sound deadening material. I installed a piece of the deadening material on the Middle Atlantic QFP-2, and installed the 2U blank in the back of the MDV-R12. I installed the AC Infinity T7-N and set the speed to 2 for now. The US-24 in the MDV-R12 is now at 48C and the US-16-XG is at 43C.

• April 30, 2019
  
  • office
    A pair of 120mm fan grills arrived from Amazon. I installed them on the internal side of the Middle Atlantic QFP-2 fans, to protect my fingers (and the fans) when I'm reaching in the rack.

    The AC Infinity AC fan controller arrived. I installed it in the rack to control the speed of the QFP-2 fans. It works fine for my purposes for now.

    I'm still waiting for a black 2U panel, sound deadener and the AC Infinity T7-N to arrive. It is likely that I'll disassemble the T7-N when it arrives, to determine what kind of work would be involved in replacing the fans with Noctua PWM fans. I don't need the high speed of the AC Infinity fans, nor the static pressure capabilities of 38mm deep fans. What I need is near silent operation, and longevity. The AC Infinity fans are rated at 67,000 hours of operation. Noctua fans are rated at 150,000 hours of operation. From what I've seen of the AC Infinity fans, I don't believe their advertised noise numbers. They're using what look to be fairly standard dual ball bearing fans, yet they rate the panel at 36 dBA max when pushing 220 CFM. That's 55 CFM per fan. Four 80mm dual ball bearing fans pushing 55 CFM each are HIGHLY unlikely to produce only 36 dBA of noise. That MIGHT be the number for a single fan, though even that would be reasonably impressive versus other 80mm x 38mm fans. But there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that all 4 fans can run at all full speed and emit 36 dBA TOTAL. I think their marketing material is misleading.

• April 28, 2019
  
  • office
    I've determined that the main source of noice from the Middle Atlantic QFP-2 is vibration of the mounting plate, which winds up being transmitted to the rest of the rack. In free air, it's quiet.

    I removed the fans and installed some silicone O-rings between the fans and the mounting plate. I also installed some rubber washers between the mounting plate and the rack rails. This helped quite a bit.

    I ordered some 80 mil butyl sound deadener to install on the mounting plate. I also ordered an AC Infinity AC fan controller, which will allow me to reduce the speed of the fans. I don't need the full 100 cfm the fans move at full speed. $18 from Amazon. I also ordered an AC Infinity T7-N for intake. I'll mount this between the US-16-XG and the US-24 in the front of the rack. It's entirely possible this will make things louder, even with the fans on low or off. That's because the US-16-XG's fans seem to always run near 50% and it's not quiet. The QFP-2 brought the reported temperature of the US-24 down from 67C to 64C or so, and disabling ports I'm not using brought it down to 57C. I'm a bit surprised by the latter; unused ports should not require much power and this isn't a PoE switch. But its fan doesn't come on at all until 70C (from what I've read); I've not yet seen it come on except when I run a fan diagnostic from the command line. My hope is that running the T7-N on low will help cool both switches and perhaps bring down the speed of the US-16-XG fans, since they're noisy 40mm critters.

    I also ordered a blank 2U panel to block more of the rear of the rack, in order to force more air to be drawn from the front of the rack. I also installed keystone blanks in the rear patch panels for the same reason.

• April 27, 2019
  
  • office
    I installed the Middle Atlantic QFP-2 in the back of the MDV-R12. I'm not thrilled with the noise level. I am now considering an AC Infinity T7.

• April 26, 2019
  
  • office
    The Middle Atlantic QFP-2 arrived from eBay. I'm hoping this is sufficient to keep the US-16-XG and US-24 in the Middle Atlantic MDV-R12 cool, by drawing air over them through the keystones I left empty on the patch panels. It's sort of frightening how warm the US-24 is to the touch, given that it has no PoE, is only a 1 gigabit switch, and I only have 8 ports active at the moment (counting the SFP ports that have SM fiber modules in them). Obviously the MDV-R12 is intended as music studio rack furniture and is hence not vented, but the back is wide open and the switches have fans. Apparently they're just not all that effective, and Ubiquiti lets the US-24 get quite warm before it runs the fans at high speed. This is a good thing in terms of office noise, but I question it for equipment longevity. The Middle Atlantic QFP-2 is rated at 100 cfm (50 cfm per fan), and is fairly quiet (30dB or so). The fans are 119mm NMB AC fans, and I've had good experiences with them in my basement rack (many years of constant use). But in this application, it's possible that they won't draw much air from the front of the rack since there's plenty of room for air to be drawn in from the back of the rack. There's only one sure way to find out, so I'm installing it tonight. It was new in box from eBay, and the price was 67% less than retail, so I'm not really concerned about it being a waste of money. I have a lot of room for more fans in the basement rack, so it'll get utilized even if I wind up not using it in the office. As far as alternatives or more cooling are concerned, a better option would probably be an AC Infinity T7 configured for intake, in the front of the rack. I don't want to go that route yet because I'd have to remove one of my Middle Atlantic TD-3 rack drawers, and drawer space in my office is precious.

    I repainted my office UPS' front panel. 20+ years ago I had painted it blue, it was time for a change. It's now black. This is a Best Power Fortress 1425, 3U rack mounted UPS. It's built like a tank, and continues to work flawlessly despite decades of full-time use. I believe I've replaced the batteries 4 times. It lacks modern features like LCD display, but that's fine with me. I'm considering ordering a custom front battery cover for it from Front Panel Express, mostly so I can have a panel that can be any color without losing the part number labelling (I'd have them engrave that on the cover). Eventually I'll have to replace it, probably with a 2U Eaton 5P.

• April 19, 2019
  
  • office
    I installed a Furman PL-PLUS C power conditioner in the office rack. I also installed the remaining patch panels and patch cables. I also installed 2U rack drawers to replace the 3U rack drawers (which no longer fit). Everything is working well.

    I installed a small terminal block and ground wire going to the ground screw on my UPS, and wired the ground wires from the rear patch panels (shielded type) to the terminal block.

    I'm waiting for a Middle Atlantic QFP-2 fan panel to arrive from eBay. It was supposed to arrive yesterday, but it appears it won't be here until Monday.

• April 14, 2019
  
  • office
    I ordered a Middle Atlantic QFP-2 from eBay for the MDV-R12 that holds my ethernet switches and UPS. The only remaining item I need is a PDU or power conditioner, preferably a Furman.

• April 13, 2019
  
  • office
    I'm still waiting for a few things to arrive from fs.com, but I have the switches and one of the 4 patch panels in one of my MDV-R12 racks just to check my intended layout. It looks fine, but I will need a fan panel in the back. There isn't much space for air to enter the front for the intake vents on the sides of the switches, and it's a long way to the back of the rack.

    I installed a pair of Middle Atlantic 8U rack rails in the back of the MDV-R12. These are for the patch panels I am installing in the rear, and to hold a fan panel.

• March 18, 2019
  
  • office
    I finished the diagram for the new patch panel setup for the office. The whole intent here is to hide away the uglier part of the cabling. I only need short jumpers on the front, with the exception of the DACs for switch-to-switch connections since I can't find really short DACs. While I could easily fit everything into one patch panel for both switches, I want the 10G connections cleanly separated from the 1G connections and to leave as much of the switch faces exposed as possible (for easy viewing of port status).

    

• December 10, 2018
  
  • hackintosh1
    I put the new Dell U3818DW on a Chief K1D120S monitor arm after mounting the K1D120S on my desk. I like the K1D120S, it works really well and the price was fantastic (clearance-like price). It freed up desk space and made it much easier to clean the top of the raised part of my desk.

    The new Sapphire Pulse RX580 card continues to work well as a replacement for my old GTX570. The GTX570 was causing crashes multiple times per day (when waking from sleep), probably due to crappy Nvidia drivers (the latest). I've had no such issues with the RX580. This was an inexpensive experiment which has worked out well. I can keep my hackintosh for a while longer before building a new desktop computer. I don't game on my desktop, but I will later want to use OpenCL for deep learning, at which point I'll use a new VEGA card with a higher core count CPU than I have right now.

• December 8, 2018
  
  • hackintosh1
    I rewrote the subsystem ID on my Intel X540-T2 10GBaseT card to make it work with the SmallTree drivers. I did this by booting ubuntu 18 from a USB thumb drive and executing ethtool. It worked fine, the X540-T2 ports now show up as en3 and en4. I may tweak this later to make one of them en0, but that'll mean tweaking things for Messages and other apps that depend on en0.

• August 12, 2018
  
  • network
    I completed the remaining two pairs of OM-4 fiber runs for the den by fishing them into the wall and terminating them in Leviton LC keystones in the second wall plate (east side of the room). I now have four pairs of OM-4 into the den, which should be sufficient for the foreseeable future. At the moment I only really need the ones on the west wall.

    I need a Ubiquiti AC In-Wall Pro in the den, since it's essentially completely blocked from the 5GHz channels from my UAC-AP-Pro. Julie needs good WiFi connectivity in tne den, and I do too. The question is where to put it where it won't be blocked by furniture. I haven't figured out how I'm going to lay out the room after I tile the floor.

• August 11, 2018
  
  • ria
    I installed the 0086L4 fan, replacing the dummy fan block. I had to use a 4-pin fan splitter cable, which isn't a great idea with RPM monitored fans but the 5th fan header on the motherboard is near the rear faceplate and I didn't have any 4-pin fan cables long enough to cleanly route from that header to the new fan. I'll order one from Amazon and replace the splitter setup when the new cable arrives.

    The new fan should help keep the Mellanox ConnectX-2 card cool.

• network
  I configured link aggregation between the US-48-500W switch and the US-16-XG switch. Hence I now have a 20 gigabit/sec link between my core switch and the aggregation switch. It's not ideal since the Unifi switches don't allow me to save the link aggregation hash type in a manner that is retained across reboots, but at least I now have SOME link aggregation and redundancy.

  Topology map from the Unifi controller:

  

• August 6, 2018
  
  • ria
    I ordered a 0086L4 fan and a 2.5" drive tray from Supermicro direct. I need the fan to keep the new Mellanox ConnectX-2 card cool. The drive tray is to allow me to put another SSD in ria or kiva.

• network
  I ordered 10 more of the 6" Cat6A patch cables from fs.com to tidy up the remaining patches from the US-48-500W switch to the first patch panel.

• August 5, 2018
  
  • network
    I significantly rearranged my ethernet switch and patch panel cabinet in the basement to make for cleaner wiring and expansion, and to provide a better path for cooling of the new US-16-XG switch. I moved all of my in-use keystones to one patch panel, and that patch panel is now between the US-16-XG and US-48-500W switches. I replaced 12 of the 1' Cat6A patch cables with 6" Cat6A patch cables. I need to order 10 more of those since they're very handy for going from a 1U switch to an adjacent 1U patch panel and they allow more air flow in my cabinet. I also now have all of my Cat6A keystones on the right side, which allows me to plug them into the US-16-XG 10GBaseT ports as desired.

    The four OM-4 fiber connections for the den are now terminated in keystones in the patch panel.

• August 4, 2018
  
  • network
    I fished the two 7m OM-4 LC duplex fiber into the wall on the west side of the den and plugged them into the Leviton fiber keystone jacks that are now in the 6-port wall plate. This plate now has two Cat6 jacks, 1 Cat6a jack and two OM-4 jacks. Given that I always have a switch in my office for random stuff I might need to plug in, I expect to use the fiber to connect a new 10 gigabit switch with a small number of ports. The only things that need 10 gigabit are computers. A 5-port switch like the Netgear XS505M would be sufficient for 10 gigabit ports.

• August 3, 2018
  
  • network
    The 10 meter OM-4 fiber patch cables I ordered from fs.com are the perfect length to reach from my basement patch panel to the wall plate on the east side of the den. The 7 meter ones I ordered are too long for the wall plate on the west side of the den, but I didn't want to wait for custom-made 6 meter ones. I'm now thinking that 5 meter ones might work, but there's not much harm in having a bit of it coiled up inside the wall. But... with 5 meter ones, I could buy OM-5 instead, which would one day allow me to have 40 or 100 gigabit connections (with SWDM). Of course, I haven't yet seen a keystone jack that claims it'll work at 100 gigabits/second.

• August 1, 2018
  
  • network
    The Ubiquiti US-16-XG arrived. I installed it and connected it to the US-48-500W switch with a pair of .5m SFP+ DAC cables. I also moved kiva and www to the US-16-XG, installed the 10Gtek MMF modules in the US-16-XG and patched them into the ports for the den on the patch panel with .5m OM-4 patch cables.

    OM-4 fiber patch cables for the ports in the den should arrive this week from fs.com. It'll be a huge relief to have that part of the cabling done so I can finally button up the ports in the den. Next week the Mellanox ConnectX-2 card for ria should arrive so it can be wired into the US-16-XG via an SFP+ DAC cable.

    I updated the firmware on the US-16-XG, the US-48-500W and my UAC AP Pro.

• July 30, 2018
  
  • network
    The 10Gtek 2m DAC cables coded for Ubiquiti arrived, as well as the FiberCablesDirect .5 meter OM4 LC-LC fiber patch cables. I also received the 10Gtex SFP+ MMF transceivers.

    It looks like the Ubiquiti US-16-XG switch will arrive on Wednesday. I need to order the fiber for the runs to the den.

• July 28, 2018
  
  • network
    The Ubiquiti US-48-500W switch arrived today, and I installed it. It just barely fits depth-wise in my cabinet. But my network is back in order for now, and I adopted the switch on my Unifi controller.

    It looks like the SFP+ ports don't reconnect to my Mellanox cards via DAC after a switch reboot. This might be due to the fact that my DAC cables are coded for Netgear, I don't know. But I need more anyway, so I ordered some that are coded for Ubiquiti from Amazon. Namely the 10Gtek ones. I ordered three of the 2 meter ones (for kiva, www and ria) and two .5 meter ones (to connect the US-48-500W to the US-16-XG when it arrives). I also ordered a pair of 10Gtek SFP+ 10G MMF transceivers and a pair of FiberCablesDirect .5 meter OM4 LC-LC fiber patch cables for the fiber runs to the den. All of this was ordered from Amazon.

    I ordered a Mellanox ConnectX-2 card from eBay to put in ria, after checking that ria contained a riser card for the 16X PCIe slot. I separately ordered a low-profile bracket for it since I couldn't find any single-port cards with a low-profile bracket. Once this is installed in ria and the US-16-XG arrives, my whole rack in the basement will be at 10 gigabits/second.

    I have not decided on a 10 gigabit switch for the den. However, at the moment the QNAP QSW-1208-8C-US is appealing.

• July 26, 2018
  
  • network
    Last week my Netgear S3300-52X-POE+ ethernet switch died. This happened overnight, and I'm not sure what happened. My UPSes had gone to battery due to the breaker tripping, and the batteries died overnight. Everything else on the UPS powered up fine, but the ethernet switch is what tripped the breaker.

    My initial diagnosis was a toasted NTC thermistor (current inrush limiter) and fuse on the power supply board. I ordered parts from Mouser and replaced them, but that didn't fix it. There's a short downstream, presumably one of the FETs (drain to source). Unfortunately I don't really have time right now to further diagnose it, and the manner in which the power supply board is populated would make it significant surgery. All of the FETs and power diodes are attached to non-trivial heatsinks in a manner that makes them impossible to replace individually. The screw heads face components like large filter capacitors, and can't be reached with screwdrivers due to proximity. The components also have thermal adhesive holding them to the heatsinks. The heatsinks also are not planar. So in order to remove one FET or power diode, I'd have to desolder a slew of them and pull the whole set out as one piece, or remove all of the the components that are in the way. This is how you build a non-repairable power supply, sigh.

    Given that I don't have time for this right now, I ordered a new Ubiquiti US-48-500W switch to replace it. Less features switching-wise, but nicer management features since I already run their controller for my WiFi access points. I also finally ordered a Ubiquiti US-16-XG, since it appears that they finally resolved the issues with 10GbaseT compatibility. The US-48-500W will become my aggregation switch for gigabit ethernet ports and the US-16-XG will become my core 10 gigabit switch. I've been shopping for over a year for the right 10 gigabit switch for my core, and the US-16-XG was my initial target. But then I saw all the issues with early revisions not talking to typical Intel 10GbaseT NICs. Unfortunately I really want a mix of SFP+ (for DACs to machines in my rack and fiber to rooms in the house that need high bandwidth) and 10GbaseT. For a while I looked at using a Mikrotik CRS317, but it has no 10GbaseT ports and their SFP+ 10G RJ45 transceivers work but get hot which makes me question their long-term reliability. While we all know that today's 10GbaseT NICs consume a decent amount of power, they're easier to cool than an SFP+ transceiver.

    Recently the QNAP QSW-1208-8C-US became available, but it's unmanaged and I've seen no reviews other than one from the complete moron Robbie (SPANdotCOM) youtuber (why do such people even bother putting their videos on youtube?). Yes, I could buy a Catalyst, ProCurve or a Netgear Mxxxx switch, but they're expensive new and for my home network, I don't need all of their features. I want some management, and PoE is a requirement. I'd definitely like working LACP, but realistically I don't need L3 features behind my gateway/firewall. I also looked at the fs.com switches and some others, but the Ubiquiti should meet my needs and be easy to manage. And hopefully, the power supply design is a little more robust. Of course, my now-dead Netgear was bought for $300 on eBay, but had performed flawlessly (and looks brand new) until last week.

• July 21, 2018
  
  • depot
    depot is now running FreeBSD 11.2-STABLE.

• kiva
  kiva is now running FreeBSD 11.2-STABLE.

• July 13, 2018
  
  • ria
    ria is now running FreeBSD 11.2-STABLE.

• May 13, 2018
  
  • UPS
    I put off buying a new UPS, and instead installed new batteries in my old Fortress 1425. It appears to be working fine, and tomorrow I'll move things back to being powered from it. Namely my desktop PC, WD NAS and my monitors.

• May 11, 2018
  
  • network
    I received 8 Leviton 411085-MLR Quickport duplex LC multimode fiber adapters from Amazon. These will allow me to run fiber to the den, and elsewhere if desired. I still need to order some fiber from fs.com, and two switches. I'm leaning toward the Mikrotik CRS317 for the switch in the basement, since I need SFP+ there more than I need 10GbaseT. My other viable option is a Ubiquiti US-16-XG, but availabilty has been absymal for an entire year, and many have had problems with the 10GbaseT ports. Not to mention the servethehome.com review that noted quality issues. This leads me to believe that Ubiquiti has a long way to go to bring the US-16-XG up to par. And at almost double the price of the Mikrotik, it's not worth it to me. All I really need is a basic L2 switch in a 1U rackmount with enough SFP+ ports to use DAC cables for ria, www and kiva and fiber to the den and other locations. In the den I'll want something with 10GbaseT ports, maybe a Netgear XS708e.

• May 2, 2018
  
  • UPS
    My ancient Best Fortress 1425 UPS has dead batteries. I think it also has a main relay failure (contact welding). While I could try buying new batteries for it and limping it along, it's over 20 years old at this point (wow). That means other components are beyond their expected lifespan. And it was a thunderstorm tonight that revealed problems, and lord only knows how many surges it has taken over the 20+ years I've used it as my desktop UPS. I know it took a brutal one at my previous home, which roasted the MOVs and thermal fuses in two of my better surge protectors at the time. I also really need an HID-compliant USB connection so I can easily monitor the UPS, or better, a network card.

    Oddly enough, for the last 5+ years, I've been debating replacing this UPS (which is for my main desktop) and others. The CyberPower units are intriguing price and feature wise, but I'm fairly reluctant to buy them for a few reasons. One, the negative reviews on Amazon are for DOA units and failures after 3 weeks to 9 months. They're also all made in China, as many things are these days. But probably most importantly... I've never seen a CyberPower UPS in a datacenter or even an enterprise environment. Small enterprise has tended to use APC (which isn't what it used to be), and datacenters and large enterprise lean toward ABB, Delta and Eaton. A major driver for datcenters is reliability, and recently, the availability of lithium ion in place of lead acid. The lithium ion solutions are expensive and not available in large solutions yet, but lead acid is a real PITA maintenance-wise since battery replacement is required every 3 to 5 years in most cases.

    While I'm just a home network user, I consider UPS fairly critical. It's the last piece of equipment I want to fail, since its failure leaves all of my equipment (and data) vulnerable. I've owned the same brand of UPS for over 20 years, and they've been reliable except for one that was a casualty of the aforementioned lightning strike. Originally Best Power, then Powerware, and now Eaton... all the same brand, they've just been bought/renamed twice. When I worked for a large ISP in the 1990's, we bought nothing but Best Power UPS. And hell, I've had one that has worked for over 20 years in far-from-ideal conditions!

    So, what's the right thing to do? Save a hundred dollars and gamble with a CyberPower unit, or go with a known quantity with a very long history of quality products? I think this one's easy: buy an Eaton and not bave to worry about it for at least a decade.

    For my desktop setup, I think the right answer is the Eaton 5P1500RC or the Eaton SP1500RT.

• December 22, 2017
  
  • pibuild
    pibuild (a VM) is now running FreeBSD 11.1-STABLE. The upgrade went fine, and I now have an 11.1-STABLE build completed for pi1 (my garage door opener) with my rotary encoder driver included. I'll soon update pi1, but I think I'm going to bump the size of the MMC card.

• December 19, 2017
  
  • depot
    depot (www) is now running FreeBSD 11.1-STABLE.

• ria
  ria is now running FreeBSD 11.1-STABLE.

• December 18, 2017
  
  • kiva
    kiva is now running FreeBSD 11.1-STABLE.

• October 28, 2017
  
  • network
    I ordered slim cat6a shielded keystone jacks and a spool of cat6a shielded (FTP) cable from monoprice.com. While I wanted Belden cable, it's 3 times the price and likely overkill for my needs. For now I mostly need to just finish wiring the den, replace the cat5 going to the family room, wire the master bedroom and replace the cat5 going to Bedroom 2.

• October 23, 2017
  
  • network
    The 1' patch cables and 3 meter DAC cables arrived from fs.com. I installed the patch cables, which cleaned things up TREMENDOUSLY. I also installed the DAC cables for testing. They're working fine, so I can start reconfiguring kiva and depot to use their 10 gigabit connections.

    I went to Lowe's for some plywood, a piece of acrylic sheet, strap hinges and hasps to make the door for the patch panel and switch enclosure.

    I cut the 4 pieces of plywood for the door and drilled the pocket holes. I then glued and screwed them together, using clamps and an engineering square to keep it square while driving the pocket hole screws. I then cut two stiles (one wider than the other to accomodate a handle) and two rails and ran them through the router table. I'd normally use symmetric stiles, but I wanted to maximize visibility into the cabinet. I glued and pocket-hole screwed the stiles and rails to the new door. I sanded it and put the first coat of polyurethane on it. I also cut the acrylic for the door's window.

    I installed an inexpensive 3" cabinet pull on the top hinged lid of the enclosure. I have an identical one for the front door of the enclosure.

    All that remains for the enclosure is attaching the strap hinges and the hasps that will keep it closed. The hasps I got are low quality but were inexpensive and will be used very infrequently. Of course I still need to install the acrylic in the door after I put a finish on the door. There isn't room for 1/4" quarter-round due to the thickness of the acrylic, so I'll probably just use caulk or a few dabs of hot glue. I could use something stronger if desired since I don't expect to ever need to replace it. On the other hand, it's acrylic so it will scratch and possibly break. I do have room to wedge something about the thickness of a penny into the groove from the rail and stile router bits, so I might just cut an oak shim and use that with no adhesive.

    I'm still waiting on shielded cat6a patch cables for the connections from the switch to ria's ethernet interfaces. They should be here this week.

• October 22, 2017
  
  • network
    All of my existing ports are patched in to the new switch with patch cables that are about 6' too long. I'll replace these when the new 1' long patch cables arrive, then repurpose the 7' patch cables to connect the rack and devices in rooms that don't need shielded cabling.

    For some as-yet-unknown reason, my Raspberry Pi garage door opener has been working fine with the new switch. Of course, it has been intermittent for months, and I assumed it was the cheap PoE splitter I used inside the enclosure for the Raspberry Pi. But perhaps it's due to the length of the ethernet run and the resulting losses, and perhaps the new switch, being 802.3at capable, cures it. I doubt it; I still suspect the POE splitter. The new switch reports only 6W total power right now (powering my Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Pro and the Raspberry Pi garage door opener). I have a much more robust replacement PoE splitter, but it will not fit inside the enclosure.

    I've concluded that I need a door on the front of my switch and patch panel enclosure, to help prevent dust. It will also give me a place to mount the wiring diagram. Other than a draw latch, I have what I need on hand, unless I want an acrylic front.

• October 20, 2017
  
  • network
    The truly inexpensive patch panels arrives from fs.com. The way the cable supports attach to the panels is flimsy, but I think they'll be OK once I bend them a bit and there is some weight of cabling on them. I installed the panels in the new enclosure, and also installed the terminal block to ground the panels. I then attached the ground wires of the panels to them terminal block. The enclosure is ready to be mounted to the wall, but I need to label all of the cables in the existing keystones since I need to remove all of them from the old enclosure. The short patch cables won't be here until Tuesday, but I can get by with the existing long patch cables until then. I want to get the new enclosure on the wall and the new switch in place so I can make sure it's fully functional.

    I labelled all of the ethernet cables from the existing keystones. I shut down my Raspberry Pi garage door opener, then removed the existing enclosure. I then installed the new enclosure on the wall and connected the grounding terminal block to my service ground block. I installed the existing keystones in the patch panel. I then installed the new switch and enough patch cables to make the network operational again.

    The correct short patch cables won't arrive until Tuesday. I still need to order cat6a shielded jacks and bulk cable.

• October 12, 2017
  
  • network
    I installed a Mellanox ConnectX-2 card in kiva with a low-profile bracket and a second one in depot (www) with a standard profile bracket. Since my new-to-me switch isn't here yet, I used a DAC cable between the two machines just to test the cards. Looks good to me. Considering that I got the pair of cards and two DAC cables for a whopping total of $57, I'm thrilled. Definitely the most cost effective network upgrade I've ever done. I don't expect the switch to cause any type of bottleneck, so I expect the same result once the switch is installed.

            dwm@www:/home/dwm% iperf -c 10.5.5.1 -i 5
            ------------------------------------------------------------
            Client connecting to 10.5.5.1, TCP port 5001
            TCP window size: 32.8 KByte (default)
            ------------------------------------------------------------
            [  3] local 10.5.5.2 port 13139 connected with 10.5.5.1 port 5001
            [ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
            [  3]  0.0- 5.0 sec  5.47 GBytes  9.39 Gbits/sec
            [  3]  5.0-10.0 sec  5.47 GBytes  9.39 Gbits/sec
            [  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  10.9 GBytes  9.39 Gbits/sec
            

    It's worth noting that at this point, typical transfers between these two machines are files, i.e. to/from spinning disks or SATA SSDs. Hence I'm still limited by what the I/O subsystem can do. In the case of a SATA to SATA transfer to and from SSD, that's roughly 4 gigabits/second. Then there are application constraints... scp is slow due to ssh being single-threaded and completely consuming a single core at less than 2 gigabits/second. For NFS, I'm not CPU bound so it's a little better. But for a single SATA III device, I'm limited to around 4.8 gigabits/second. In other words, without going to many spindles or SSDs, I'm not going to hit 10 gigabits/second. This is OK in my mind. The focus right now is to be able to go above 1 gigabit/second for things like backups, SVN checkouts, etc. This is network upgrades, I'm not yet addressing I/O issues and likely won't need to any time soon. But I want the network to be ready when I someday wind up with faster I/O subsystems.

• October 11, 2017
  
  • network
    SFP+ DAC cables should arrive today from fs.com. I need these to connect www and kiva to the new ethernet switch. The 24-port shielded patch panels should also arrive, which will allow me to later run 10GbaseT in the house. I don't have any shielded keystones or shielded cat6a bulk cable yet, but will get them as needed.

• October 9, 2017
  
  • network
    I'm waiting for a new (to me) ethernet switch to arrive. I've been out of ports for a bit on my main switch, and there's still some wiring to be done for the den and the master bedroom. Not to mention eventually the basement and a couple of cameras. In the process I'll wind up connecting kiva via 10G (SFP+ with a DAC cable). The same is likely true for depot, but to do that I'll need to move my M1015 card to an X4 slot which could be a problem in the long run. However, right now depot only has a few disk drives so PCIE 2.x x4 bandwidth is more than sufficient. I believe the x4 slot on the motherboard is electrically x16 (it is physically), but it definitely only has 4 PCI 2.0 lanes. The Mellanox ConnectX-2 card I intend to use for 10G ethernet wants 8 PCI 2.0 lanes so it has to go into the x16 slot that's currently occupied by the M1015. In kiva, I shouldn't have any trouble since there's an x8 slot available. I did have to order a low-profile bracket for the ConnectX-2 card for kiva, $6.95 on eBay.

    The new switch has 48 1000baseT ports, two dedicated 10GbaseT ports and two dedicated SFP+ ports. I'll use the SFP+ ports with DAC cables for kiva and www, and 10GbaseT for the den despite the fact that I don't currently have anything in the den that can do 10 gigabit.

    A nice thing about the new switch is that it will allow me to retire two switches, at least for now. I had a 16-port Zyxel as my main switch and a 16-port Netgear with 8 PoE ports to drive PoE devices like my main WiFi AP and my Raspberry Pi garage door opener. But the Zyxel is unmanaged, and hence I couldn't do any link aggregation betweeen the switches. Not a huge problem for the two devices on it right now, but adding a camera or anything that used real bandwidth was going to create a bottleneck. The new switch has 48 1G ports, and all are PoE+ capable. The total PoE power budget is 390 watts, which I don't expect to ever need.

    A bad thing about the new switch is that I need to do some rearranging in my rack to accomodate it. It is deeper than my existing switch. Since I have my switch in the back of the rack, it needs to be in a position where it doesn't conflict with the opposite device in the front of the rack. The new switch's air flow is side-to-side, which I also need to take into account. But the big issue at the moment is that my Middle Atlantic rack drawer is in the front of the rack opposite where I'd like to place the new switch, which creates a problem for the new switch.

    In preparation, I moved one of my NMB fan panels in the back of the rack and then moved my KVM and the rackmount LCD/keyboard down 1U in the front of the rack. I haven't moved the Middle Atlantic drawer yet but will do that once the new switch arrives.

• October 8, 2017
  
  • pi1
    I tested the cabling from my switch to the outlet in the garage, and it seems fine to me. Hence the problems with my Raspberry Pi GDO going down for days at a time is likely the demise of the PoE splitter. I ordered a beefier one from fs.com that's PoE+ capable and can output 25W. It likely won't fit in my enclosure, but that's OK as long as it turns out to be the solution to my problem. Assuming it does, I'll splice the cable from the old supply and mount the new splitter outside of the enclosure if necessary.

• June 14, 2017
  
  • depot
    depot (www) is now running FreeBSD 11.1-BETA1.

• ria
  ria is now running FreeBSD 11.1-BETA1.

• kiva
  kiva is now running FreeBSD 11.1-BETA1.

• May 26, 2017
  
  • hackintosh
    My hackintosh is now running macOS Sierra.

• March 14, 2017
  
  • ria
    I installed the new version of ria. It's nice to have 32G of RAM, a Xeon 4-core CPU and 4 gigabit ethernet ports. I don't really need the CPU except to be able to address RAM. The previous hardware was constrained to 4G of RAM. Which is plenty for simple gateway tasks, but I want to be able to use ZFS and I also want to run more elaborate intrusion detection software. I'm glad I went with a Supermicro chassis since the hot swap cages are the same as those in kiva.

    The new hardware is in the rack and doing its duty. Since it's only 1U, some rack space was made available. i installed two of my Middle Atlantic 2U rackmount drawers so I have space to store tools, extra fans and spare hard drives.

    It is interesting that it might turn out that the new machine is roughly equivalent in power consumption to the old machine. If true, I'll chalk it up to newer CPUs having wider and more effective SpeedStepping, an efficient motherboard, SSD instead of a spinning drive for root, and fewer spinning drives.

• March 6, 2017
  
  • ria
    I finally ordered a replacement for ria. I've needed to do this for a while. Normally I don't have CPU load issues on ria, but it's severely memory constrained at 4G (due to Intel Atom D510), and I want to be able to revive some of my old monitoring software and also run ZFS. The latter is the main impetus for more RAM.

    The machine I ordered is a used 1U server from eBay. A Supermicro CSE-815TQ-600WB chassis, X9SCi-LN4F motherboard, Xeon E3-1270v2 CPU, 32G of RAM. I ordered a Supermicro MCP-220-00043-0N drive caddy in order to install a Samsung 850 Pro in one of the hotswap bays as the root drive. I may later change to ZFS on root, and it's possible I'll move the Samsung 850 Pro outside of the hot swap bays. I also ordered a Supermicro CSE-PTFB-813LB front bezel. I don't need the lock, but I do need the filter. I have a similar bezel on kiva, and it's very useful in my environment (my unfinished basement).

    I don't really need the oomph of an E3-1270v2 CPU, and hence I might replace it with an E3-1265Lv2 to save power (and heat/noise). The one area where CPU has been an issue on ria's current hardware is compiling the kernel or 'make buildworld'. So it will be nice to have a significant bump in performance when I'm upgrading/updating. And I'll be happy to have additional gigabit ethernet ports, since it gives me some flexibility I currently do not have. Cordoning off my WiFi and IoT devices, for example. And having a separate network to connect to kiva if desired.

    The new hardware won't be her until next week. Hopefully the failing hard drive in ria will last that long. I already have the Samsung 850 Pro loaded from a good ria backup in case I need to swap it in before the new hardware arrives.

• February 26, 2017
  
  • hackintosh
    I finished installing the second WD RE 2TB drive. Something odd happened when populating the second drive (Data) from the first drive (Data Backups). The copy halted, and I found the Data drive reporting Current_Pending_Sector as 4 in S.M.A.R.T. I would normally expect a drive in this state to either decrement Current_Pending_Sector as it reallocates the sectors (and increment Reallocated_Sector_Ct), or decrement Current_Pending_Sector if a successful read of the sectors occurs. Since I was only writing to the drive, I suspect the LBAs in question were holding filesystem metadata.

    I wound up writing zeros to the whole drive (5 hours), then recreating the Data partition and copying again. The Current_Pending_Sector count wehnt to 0, and Reallocated_Sector_Ct remains at 0. I will keep an eye on things. This drive is used, and has 20,000 hours on it (2.28 years). The first drive (Data Backups) also has 20,000 hours on it. In both cases, that's less hours than the drive that was replaced, and the replaced drives were not enterprise drives.

• February 25, 2017
  
  • hackintosh
    I installed one of the refurbished WD RE 2TB drives as a replacement for my original Data Backups drive. I then fixed the configuration in Carbon Copy Cloner and started a backup of Data to Data Backups.

• February 24, 2017
  
  • hackintosh
    I bought a pair of refurbished WD RE 2TB drives from Microcenter. These will replace the 500G and 1TB drives I was using for Data and Data Backups. My existing Data volume is used for iTunes music and movie files, and was nearly full.

• February 21, 2017
  
  • kiva
    I added another vdev to the zfs1 pool on kiva. It's another pair of HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB drives, mirrored.

    When I installed the new drives in their hot-swap bays, they showed up as da3 and da4. I then did this:

             # gpart create -s gpt da3
             # gpart create -s gpt da4
             # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -l gpzfs1_2 -b1M -s3725G da3
             # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -l gpzfs1_3 -b1M -s3725G da4
             # zpool add zfs1 mirror /dev/gpt/gpzfs1_2 /dev/gpt/gpzfs1_3
            

• January 8, 2017
  
  • depot
    depot is now running FreeBSD 10.3-STABLE.

• December 16, 2016
  
  • network
    I added this line to /var/etc/persistent/cfg/mgmt on my UAP-AC-PRO in order to make the LED ring white:

              mgmt.led_pattern_override=2
            

• August 10, 2016
  
  • pi1
    I cut the hole in the wall of the garage for a rework box for a POE jack and a pair of jacks for the garage door activation wires. I had previously drilled the hole in the top plate from the garage attic. Tonight I used my fiberglass fish tape and pulled the garage door activation wires into the attic and ran them through the attic to the garage door openers. I also pulled some cat5e into the attic, but I haven't decided how I'm going to get it into the basement yet. Most likely I'll go into the main attic and down through the PVC raceway I've used for runs to the 2nd floor bedrooms. It makes for a longer run, but it involves a lot less guesswork.

• August 3, 2016
  
  • pi1
    Nearly 6 months later, I have a fully functional software suite for a WiFi-enabled garage door opener based on the Raspbery Pi running FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT. There is a client/server API (fully encrypted, with authentication) and a Web component written with Wt (C++) that communicates over the encrypted client/server API. On the Raspberry Pi side, I wrote my own rotary encoder driver to use edge-triggered interrupts from rotary encoder signals, which communicates with userland via kqueue for efficiency (no pin polling for the rotary encoders). There are inputs for buttons to activate the garage doors, rotary encoder inputs to track door movement and magnetic switch inputs for door closure switches. There are outputs (via relays) to activate the garage doors and LED indicator outputs for tri-color LEDs. I designed my own PCB to stack on top of the Raspberry Pi 2, which holds relays, relay drivers, LED drivers and input conditioning. I've ordered the first prototype boards, they should be here in about a week. I already have the components to populate them.

    I intend to power everything using PoE (power over ethernet). Today I received a Netgear ProSAFE JGS516PE gigabit ethernet switch with 8 PoE ports that I'll be installing in my rack in the basement. I have plans for some PoE IP cameras and other PoE devices, so the switch made more sense than a single injector with a power brick. Multiple power bricks don't scale, and are a very messy solution.

    To power the Raspberry Pi from PoE, I'm using a small PoE to microUSB device that I'll put inside a larger enclosure with the Raspberry Pi 2. This enclosure will also house the indicator LEDs and door activation buttons. The door activation buttons are just for convenience; I often want to be able to open or close the garage door without crossing the garage, and the buttons will allow me to do that while standing near the doors.

• February 11, 2016
  
  • pi1
    I've been working a bit with a Raspberry Pi recently. Today I finished updating one to Raspbian 'jessie' using a 16G Samsung microSD card, and recompiled libDwm and my in-progress garage door opener code. The idea for the garage door opener is to allow me to use my iPhone to open and close my garage doors. While there are some commercial solutions available, the reviews are generally poor. For one, they generally require external cloud access, an absurd requirement for a garage door opener (though several other IoT devices for home have the same absurd requirement). From reviews, the services appear to be poorly provisioned. And I would wager that they're not thoroughly secured. Plus, who wants to depend on their broadband connection to open their garage door when they're well within WiFi range of their garage door?

    I want better information about my garage door than just closed or not closed, without resorting to using a camera. For this reason, not only do I want a switch to tell me the door is closed, but I want an optical encoder to tell me when the door is in motion (including direction). I'm almost tempted to design the whole opener so I can detect when the door stops from force, but I can do most of that with just the encoder and tapping the beam detectors. If the door reverses while closing, it either means someone commanded it to reverse (which I can detect) or it means there was an obstruction.

    Ideally I'd be able to get approval for using my app with CarPlay, but I'm a long way from looking at that option.

    I've started writing the code for the garage door state machine, and I'm writing the unit tests as I go.

• February 9, 2016
  
  • kiva
    kiva is now running FreeBSD 10.3-PRERELEASE. I started portmaster to update all of the ports.

• August 6, 2015
  
  • oldria
    Well, I'm still having problems with em1 hanging on ria. I'm building a kernel with option EM_MULTIQUEUE now. This is not supported by Intel, and I would not be surprised if it doesn't help, or makes things worse. I may wind up rolling back to an earlier driver.

    In the long term, I need to replace the motherboard and CPU on ria with something with a bit more oomph. What I really want is a system with an Atom C2750 or C2758. This would allow me to use more RAM, and give me more ethernet ports so I can create a separate LAN for the connection to kiva.

• August 3, 2015
  
  • oldria
    As of last night, ria is now running FreeBSD 10.2-PRERELEASE (the latest 10.1-STABLE). I didn't plan this update, but after many years of running well, Intel broke the em Ethernet driver for the 83574 chipset (the 7.4.2 release of the driver). The symptom was watchdog timeouts, typically during transmission due to NFS client activity. Fortunately, sbruno fixed it and it was MFC'ed in the middle of June. He also added EM_MULTIQUEUE, which I have not tried yet. More details here. The fix appears to work fine; I copied 60 gigabytes of data from ria via NFS without incident. I couldn't do that before this fix, it would hang before a few gigabytes were completed. The workaround suggested by others with the unfixed driver was to disable TSO (TCP segmentation offloading) with ifconfig em1 -tso. That didn't work for me; it delayed the problem, but it would still occur within 10 minutes of a large transfer on gigabit ethernet.

• August 2, 2015
  
  • depot
    Depot's backup disk space is now a ZFS mirrored pool of two HGST 4TB drives (one Deskstar, one Deskstar NAS).

• July 26, 2015
  
  • depot
    depot is now my web server, and has been renamed.

• kiva
  kiva is now installed in the rack, though not in its final position. I'll move it downward later.

• www
  depot is now my web server. www has been renamed oldwww and will remain online until I'm sure I have everything I need from it.

• July 25, 2015
  
  • depot
    The backup of /backups finished overnight. I recreated the partition on ada0 using gpart and gave it a label of backup1fs. I started the restore over the network from ria. It finished in less than 2 hours.

• July 24, 2015
  
  • depot
    I migrated the operating system of depot to a Samsung 840 Pro SSD I had previously used in my hackintosh. I used GPT partitioning and labelled all of the partitions. It's up and running on the SSD, and I'm now in the process of backing up the 4TB HGST drive (which only hosts backups) over the network to ria so I can repartition it and give it a gpart label. This will let me move it around in the hot-swap bays without complications. With an IPMI-enabled machine this isn't an issue since I can get at the console remotely, but depot doesn't have IPMI.

    Thanks to Warren Block for his concise write-up on partitioning with GPT at http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html

• July 23, 2015
  
  • kiva
    The new server (named kiva) is up and running. I haven't installed it in the rack yet since I want to finish migrating things from my current web server to depot (which will become my new web server). I did the hard part tonight, which was to migrate my UPS monitoring. While nut is a nice tool, it isn't friendly to these types of migrations. All slaves have to be reconfigured manually. If I were smart, I'd rewrite the client/server part of upsmon. Possibly using multicast since the odds are good that all of the machines are on the same LAN. Or using CORBA with the Naming Service.

    At any rate, UPS monitoring has been migrated to depot. Since depot doesn't have a DB9 serial port, I am using a USB to serial adapter.

    I need to put a Samsung 850 Pro SSD in depot. It's still running the OS from a now-ancient WD VelociRaptor drive that has seen better days. depot could use speedier I/O there now that it will be my web server, and I'd prefer the reliability of a Samsung 850 Pro versus a spinning drive.

• July 17, 2015
  
  • www
    On Monday, a used server should arrive that will replace my primary backup server (depot). What is now depot will become my web server, and I'll retire my existing web server.

    The main motivation for this change: RAM. My existing web server has 4G of RAM and an Intel Atom D510 which can't address more memory. Most of the time this isn't a big issue, but over the years the memory utilization on my server has crept upward to the point where I now see a few hundred megabytes of swap occupied (though very little paging activity). The second motivation is CPU. While my new gallery software is MUCH speedier and more efficient than gallery3, I'd like my bulk photo uploads to be a little snappier. Depot's i5-2405S processor will provide the oomph I need. I know this because depot was the host I used to develop my gallery software.

    The used server arriving on Monday is a Supermicro X8DTN+ motherboard in a Supermicro SC826 2U chassis. It contains a pair of Xeon L5640 CPUs and 48G of RAM. The chassis has 12 hot-swap drive bays. I don't intend to fully occupy the drive bays, but I did buy an LSI 9211-8i flashed to IT mode for ZFS. I have a new Crucial MX100 512G flash drive that I'll use for the OS drive, ands I bought 2 Supermicro hot-swap cages for 2.5" drives; one for the OS drive and one for an SSD SLOG if I decide to add one. Today, I don't have high sync loads and hence I don't need an SLOG. That may change in the future, hence the second 2.5" hot-swap cage.

    The L5640 CPUs are overkill for my needs. I may buy L5630 CPUs to replace them, in the interest of reducing power consumption. I like the idea of having 12 cores for the times I need to do something intensive, but these are older Xeons and not as power-efficient as say a new E3 or E5 Xeon. But this really boils down to up-front cost; I got the server with chassis, rails, motherboard, CPUs and RAM for $600. The LSI 9211-8i was $129. The Crucial MX100 was $159. I will add a pair of 4TB disk drives (ZFS mirror) after I've loaded the operating system.

• June 17, 2015
  
  • www
    My web server is now running FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE. I have some port/pkg updating to do, but the 10.1 upgrade was the first step to allow me to deploy my new gallery software so I can ditch gallery3. The end goal is being able to ditch mysql since it's a resource hog. I might need to replace wordpress in order to do that, but that's not a big deal. I don't use my blog all that often and I really should just write a speedier replacement for it using Wt.

• May 9, 2015
  
  • depot
    I installed an HGST 7K4000 4TB drive in depot to temporarily host TimeMachine backups of my hackintosh. Eventually I'll add more 4TB drives and use ZFS, but I needed something to replace the backups that were going to ria but haven't worked for 4 months due to insufficient space. The disk that was previously hosting hackintosh backups on ria is now hosting backups of depot's operating system (/, /var and /usr).

• December 7, 2014
  
  • depot
    I am updating depot to FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE as of today. It was previously running 10.1-PRERELEASE.

• November 28, 2014
  
  • oldria
    I updated ria to FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE as of today. This brings it past the 10.1-RELEASE date. Previously it was running 10.1-STABLE, but from before 10.1-RELEASE.

• November 16, 2014
  
  • hackintosh
    I now have the WiFi/Bluetooth card from osxwifi.com installed and it works with Handoff. I had to log out of iCloud a few times on all of my devices to get Handoff working, but it's done and I like it.

    I continue to muck around with my Clover configuration. Once every couple of days, it will crash when trying to wake it up. I'm hoping that my latest configuration changes will resolve the issue, but we'll see. Some of it is probably due to the U1L BIOS on the motherboard, but there's nothing newer from Gigabyte that is UEFI.

• iPhone 6 Plus
  I installed a Tech Armor HD Clear Ballistic Glass Screen Protector on my iPhone 6 Plus. I bought it at Amazon. I like it. It feels better than the screen protectors I used on my iPhone 4S, and it's crystal clear. It was also significantly less expensive than others I looked at: $9.31 wiht free Prime shipping.

  I am using the new lightining cables I got from Amazon and so far I like them. They are from IXCC. They're a little bit beefier than the Apple cables, but they don't conflict with the edge of my Pad & Quill case.

• November 9, 2014
  
  • depot
    I updated depot to FreeBSD 10-STABLE. I need to finally start putting it into service since I need to upgrade my firewall and web server. Both need more memory, and unfortunately that means new motherboards and processors. :-(

    I'm still working on installing the ports I need on depot.

• iPhone 6 Plus
  I ordered some USB to lightning cables from Amazon. Two 6-foot long ones for my office, a 3-foot long one for my car and a 3-foot long one for my backpack. I'll continue to use the original Apple one in the kitchen for charging my phone. I also ordered a new cigar lighter charger since the one I use in the MINI cooper is dead.

• November 6, 2014
  
  • hackintosh1
    I take back what I said yesterday about my hackintosh behaving well. RTC wakeups were still causing crashes while I was at work. At the moment I'm not sure why. But I don't like the idea of my machine waking up every 2 hours anyway, so I installed Sleepwatcher and now have it unloading discoveryd when I put the machine to sleep and reloading it when the machine wakes up. This should stop the RTC maintenance wakeups. I also re-enabled "wake from network" in the Energy Saver section of System Preferences so I can wake up my hackintosh from the outside world when I need to fetch a file from it.

• November 5, 2014
  
  • hackintosh1
    After much fussing, I finally have my hackintosh behaving as well or better with Yosemite than it was with Mountain Lion. I still only have two CPU P-states while using AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement, 1.6GHz and to 4.2GHz. Actually, I'm not sure that's true since HWSensors says otherwise. I have no SSDT installed, I'm letting Clover do things for me. I can live with this for now.

    I have yet to figure out why I can't completely boot from my OS backup drive. I do have full backups running to it now using the latest Carbon Copy Cloner. And I did install Clover on it, in the EFI partition like my primary boot drive. Same drivers, kernel extensions, etc. And I can boot the OS from that drive when the bootloader runs from my primary drive. It's possible that there's something wonky about my BIOS, I don't know yet. At the moment I'm not going to worry about it too much. The new primary boot drive is a Samsung 850 Pro which will likely outlive the rest of this machine.

    The only thing left is to get a decent USB 3.0 hub and to get Bluetooth working without using the IOGear USB Bluetooth dongle, so I can have Handoff work. I ordered a WiFi card setup from osxwifin.com, which will resolve the issue with the card I have now (which was bogusly sold as an Apple card; it's not!).

• November 2, 2014
  
  • hackintosh1
    All of my boot problems revolved around bugs in OsxAptioFixDrv.efi. I found a newer version on a forum and installed it. My boot problems are resolved. Note that I have to use the Nvidia Web drivers to get full resolution on my monitors at the moment, which leaves some things to be desired. Maybe I'll eventually upgrade to a GTX680 or some other Kepler card so I can ditch the Nvidia drivers if desired. The ones I'm using are a bit old, only because I was lazy and grabbed some that someone already modified to work with any system definition (I'm using iMac12,2 at the moment).

    I believe I have iMessages working again. The issue was that I had forgotten to transfer my ROM setting from Mountain Lion.

    It looks like SMS via my iPhone works. Yay! AirDrop works too, in both directions (desktop to phone, phone to desktop). I love you Apple!

• November 1, 2014
  
  • hackintosh1
    After nearly 20 hours of work, I have Yosemite running on my hackintosh. Most of the difficulty in installation revolved around waiting so long (I skipped Mavericks altogether). Getting a Clover USB stick to boot to the installation screen was very difficult. I could not use the latest Clover, I had to back down to r2976. I also had a great deal of difficulty using traditional BIOS (version F12 for my motherboard), and wound up updating to UEFI (version u1l). This alleviated a lot of headaches, but it was still difficult to get my Clover USB stick to boot to the Yosemite installation. Some of this revolved around my video card (Nvidia GTX570), I had to use nv_disable=1 as a boot argument in Clover.

    Further difficulties ensued once I had a Yosemite base installation. I had to install the Nvidia Web drivers and add PatchVBiosBytes to get my GTX570 to run at full resolution. Then I shot myself in the foot trying to get the Bluetooth on my WiFi card to work, and had to use single-user mode from my Clover USB stick to repair what I ahd done (modifying an Info.plist for Bluetooth).

    I have yet to dig into the issues with iCloud, but it should not be difficult.

    So at the moment, I'm alomost back to where I was with Mountain Lion, except for iCloud/iMessages and Bluetooth. I still need to dig into the Nvidia issue of running at full tilt all of the time.

• October 31, 2014
  
  • hackintosh1
    I went to MicroCenter and bought a 512G Samsung 850 Pro SSD drive so I can finally start working on updating to Yosemite. I skipped Mavericks, which likely means I'm in for some difficulties. Since this machine is my only desktop and my primary computer, I need to use a new drive so I'll have my old one as my backup.

    I hemmed and hawed over which SSD to buy for over a month. The 850 Pro is not cheap. But I've been very happy with my other Samsung SSD drives, and in the end it boiled down to reliability. The 850 Pro carries a 10 year warranty, well above any others in the industry (most are 3 years, some are 5 years). Recovering from a dead drive eats more of my time than the entire price of the drive is worth.

    I also bought a Sandisk Extreme 32G flash drive. This will replace one of my older 16G drives that I intend to use for the Clover and Yosemite bootstrap. I already have a 16G Sandisk Extreme that I use for work, and I've been very happy with it (it's speedy).

    Finally, I bought another Razer Naga mouse to replace my existing one. Razer sucks quality-wise, my old mouse was used less than 100 hours total (I almost never use it or even plug it in since I much prefer my Apple trackpad). The old mouse lights up and the buttons work but the sensor doesn't work. The only reason I bought another Razer is that MicroCenter doesn't have a lot of wired mice that work well with OS X in the store. I don't want Bluetooth or RF when installing a new OS, I need the reliability of a wired USB mouse.

• October 29, 2014
  
  • oldria
    I finished the cleanup work on ria for FreeBSD 10.1-PRERELEASE.

    I'm glad I did the upgrade. By moving from bind to unbound for DNS, I'm no longer seeing memory utilization issues. This saves me real money since I no longer need to consider bumping the memory here. The memory for this machine is not cheap since it's now outdated. I'm seeing 3.7G free memory out of 4G, with all the services I need running.

• October 28, 2014
  
  • oldria
    ria is now running FreeBSD 10.1-PRERELEASE. I updated it from source (my source tree is now from stable/10). Since FreeBSD has dropped BIND from the base, I'm now using unbound. It's simpler to configure, appears to use less memory, and is hence more suited to my needs. I put my configuration in RCS.

    I'm thrilled to have basically the same C++ compiler environment as my OS X machines. A modern C++ compiler with full C++11 and C++14 support and better licensing than GPLv3.

    I cleaned up most of the old ports and reinstalled those I need. I have to admit that I was sad to see the ludicrous number of dependencies now included by installing emacs-nox11. But I can't live without my favorite editor for the last 20 years. I updated to isc-dhcp43-server, and just rebooted to make sure that all of my changes are good.

• October 27, 2014
  
  • oldria
    I finished updating ria to FreeBSD 9.3-STABLE. Mainly to get clang and friends. I've started the process of updating to 10-STABLE.

• iPhone 6 Plus
  My iPhone 6 Plus arrived today. Not much to say yet other than I'm happy to have a phone whose battery is new. It's been busy ever since I got home... restored a backup from my old phone, updated to iOS 8.1, firmware update, and now it's grinding away updating apps since I had not bumped my old iPhone to iOS 8.1

• October 21, 2014
  
  • hackintosh1
    The Broadcom BCM84360CD card and PCI-E adapter arrived from eBay. I installed the card in the adapter. It looks like it'll work fine, and I'll probably yank out the FL1009-based USB 3.0 card to make room for it. I don't use the FL1009-based board now because...

    I installed GenericUSBXHCI.kext from here. I now have working USB 3.0 ports from my motherboard. Awesome! I need to do this on mom's hackintosh and again on my own when I install Yosemite.

• October 17, 2014
  
  • iPhone 6 Plus
    Apps I want: Pixelmator. Replay.

• October 16, 2014
  
  • hackintosh1
    When I arrived home from work, my Best Fortress 1425 UPS was wailing. The batteries are just over 2 years old. I don't think the batteries are the issue here. This UPS is about 20 years old at this point (it's by far my oldest UPS), it's time to replace it. It doesn't have an HID compliant USB port and I want that in a new UPS.

• October 8, 2014
  
  • hackintosh1
    I ordered a Broadcom BCM84360CD card and a PCI-E adapter from eBay. As near as I can tell, I need this to have support for Handoff and Continuity in OS X Yosemite. Of course I won't use the WiFi and may or may not use the Bluetooth since my existing Bluetooth dongle works for my purposes.

• September 28, 2014
  
  • www
    www now has bash 4.3.27 in response to Shellshock.

• oldria
  I updated ria to FreeBSD 8.4-STABLE and bash to 4.3.27 in response to Shellshock.

• September 27, 2014
  
  • www
    I updated my web server to FreeBSD 8.4-STABLE. I really need to migrate to FreeBSD 9 or 10, but don't have the time at the moment. This update was just to migrate to the new port packaging and pick up the new bash shell to address security issues.

• July 5, 2014
  
  • hackintosh1
    I updated my hackintosh to 10.8.5. I had some headaches with audio. Initially, I had no audio at all after the update, which was expected. After using MultiBeat 5.5.5 to update my audio, I still had no audio. I needed to remove the 'npci=0x3000' argument to Clover. Then I had output, but it was very muffled. I had used the "With DSDT" option, which edits the DSDT in-place. Umm, yeah, except it edits the one for Chameleon and I'm using Clover. I copied the new DSDT from /Extra/DSDT.aml to /EFI/ACPI/patched/DSDT.aml and all is well.

• February 23, 2013
  
  • Apple
    I really like the Apple TV I hooked up last night. One thing worth noting... some of the movies I encoded a long time ago don't play audio over AirPlay due to having AC-3 multichannel audio. This is a shame, I'll have to see what kind of results I get transcoding them since I don't have all of the original DVDs.

    My old Sunfire Ultimate Receiver started flaking out last night. It would appear to shut down randomly, and would not properly respond to controls on the front panel. I don't know why. I tried the factory reset mechanism (hold the TONE DOWN button and the POWER button until 'RESETTING TO FACTORY DEFAULTS' appears), but it did not help. So I took it apart expecting to find a popped electrolytic capacitor or the like. I found nothing wrong, and I was impressed with the overall design (pretty neat how all of the gazillion FETs are attached to the bottom of the chassis, and the bottom of the chassis is a thick piece of aluminum with threaded holes as well as PEM nuts). I wish I had taken pictures. I cleaned it with compressed air and reassembled it. It's now working fine, but I don't believe my cleaning fixed it. I'm not going to sweat it too much; I'm long overdue for a new receiver (one with HDMI inputs), along with a new TV.

    Speaking of old A/V gear... my TV has no HDMI inputs, only component video. And it'll do 720p and 1080i, but not 1080p. I'm using a ViewHD HDMI to component video converter for the Apple TV. It works well so far.

• February 22, 2013
  
  • hackintosh1
    I hooked up my Apple TV. I like it a lot; it just works. I had no problems using AirPlay from my hackintosh to watch a movie ("The Guard"). The AppleTV sees my iTunes collections without trouble. Now if only I could have a solid version of ZFS on OS X for free, I'd change depot's operating system to OS X so I could use it as an iTunes server. I will try running forked-daapd on depot.

    I added a second option for a USB 3.0 hub to my wish list. It's the Satechi UH3-10P, which has 10 USB 3.0 ports plus a charging port.

• February 16, 2013
  
  • hackintosh1
    I ordered a Moshi Luna keyboard. Since it doesn't have a built-in USB hub like my das keyboard, I also ordered a Satechi Premium 4-port Aluminum USB hub and a 3-meter USB extension cable. This will let me keep my USB Bluetooth adapter near my trackpad, and give me something nearby to plug in my mouse when I need it (almost never these days).

    I also ordered Sanyo eneloop AA batteries with a 4-location charger so I can start using them for my Magic Trackpad. I've been meaning to switch to rechargeables here and elsewhere for ages, to save money and reduce the amount of batteries I recycle. I am thrilled with the Energizer Ultimate lithium so far, but they're expensive and I would rather just use good-quality NiMH rechargeables.

• hackintosh2
  I got the FL1009-based USB 3.0 card working in my hackintosh. I believe the issue with mom's hackintosh was that I forgot to remove the PXHCD and/or CalDigit kexts. I should be able to get it working on her machine without trouble.

  I ordered Sanyo eneloop AA batteries with a 4-location charger so mom can start using them for her Magic Trackpad.

  I also ordered a Satechi Premium 4-port Aluminum USB 2.0 hub for her, with a 3-meter extension cable. The extension cable will let her plug it into the back of the machine if she doesn't want to plug it into her Apple keyboard. The advantage of this hub over others is purely cosmetic: it matches her Apple keyboard and trackpad. The disadvantage is that it's bus-powered, so it can't be effectively used for anything that draws a lot of current. It should be fine for thumb drives and the like.

• February 14, 2013
  
  • hackintosh1
    I got the FL1009-based USB 3.0 card working in my hackintosh. I believe the issue with mom's hackintosh was that I forgot to remove the PXHCD and/or CalDigit kexts. I should be able to get it working on her machine without trouble.

    Worth noting that the molex power header on this card SUCKS. It's very flimsy, and the holes for its latches are way too big so the latches will not stay in place. Hence the header bends awat from the board when trying to install the cable, or after installation if the cable is routed downward. As a result, I wound up drilling a small hole through the PCB to allow a cable tie to be installed to hold the header in place.

• February 13, 2013
  
  • hackintosh2
    I installed the TP-LINK TL-WDN4800, at mom's place. It appears to work fine. She's now up and running.

    The FL1009-based USB 3.0 card caused the machine to not finish booting. Got to the gray screen, then it hung. Might have been due to not having the molex plug powered. I didn't power it because it's going to take a little work to make the cabling tidy. I left it out for now, I'll get one working in my machine and then duplicate the work on mom's machine.

    Mom's Mac Mini was running OS X 10.4. There's a long list of things I need to show her. I don't expect her to remember everything from a crash course, but she'll likely remember a faint inkling of their existence and be able to find and use them herself once she knows they exist. It's not like there isn't a lot of helpful information online, and she can always call me for help.

• February 10, 2013
  
  • hackintosh2
    I put the second coat of polyurethane on the rolling platform. I also picked up the casters and wood screws from Lowe's. After the second coat dried to the touch, I installed the casters and applied the third coat of polyurethane on the top. I don't intend to put a third coat on the bottom.

    For some reason I thought mom had a wired ethernet connection to her Verizon internet connection. She doesn't; she's using wireless because she had her LTE modem placed in one bedroom but moved her computer to a different bedroom. So she needs a wireless card for the hackintosh. I ordered a TP-LINK TL-WDN4800 since it supposedly works out of the box. If that turns out to not be true, I will likely just run some wired ethernet for her with drops from the attic and wallplates.

    I also ordered some Fresco Logic FL1009-200 USB 3.0 PCI Express cards. These supposedly work out of the box with Mountain Lion. While they're slower than some other cards, they're still much faster than a typical USB 2.0 port.

• February 8, 2013
  
  • hackintosh2
    Tonight I started building the rolling platform for this machine. It's almost exactly the same as the one I built for my first hackintosh build. The ony difference is that it's 1 inch shorter since my original one was longer than necessary in case I one day get an even bigger case. I can't imagine mom ever wanting or needing a bigger computer case than the Arc Midi (it's already bigger than needed), so it made sense to reduce the length of the platform. It's all glued up and rough-sanded, I'll finish sanding it and start putting the finish on it soon.

• February 7, 2013
  
  • hackintosh1
    Since I've been having trouble with lynx2mac's ethernet driver for some time (it sometimes fails miserably when waking from sleep, forcing a full power cycle to fix it), I've switched to using the Realtek driver for Lion. So far, it's working fine. I suspect this is really a Realtek hardware problem for which lynx2mac doesn't have a workaround.

• hackintosh2
  I picked up an Apple wired keyboard at the Apple Store in the Twelve Oaks Mall. I have no idea if mom will adjust to using it. But it's fully functional, it's sleek, and it matches the Magic Trackpad. I continue to wish that Apple would offer a wired keyboard with no numeric keypad. Some of us aren't fond of batteries in something we never move and hence don't need wireless, but would like to have our trackpad closer to the keys we use. I never use my numeric keypad. I realize it's important for some people, but many of us could do without it.

  Since I've been having trouble with lynx2mac's ethernet driver for some time (it sometimes fails miserably when waking from sleep), I've switched to using the Realtek driver for Lion. So far, it's working fine.

• February 5, 2013
  
  • hackintosh2
    The das keyboard arrived, but it's the wrong keyboard. I should've paid attention to the negative reviews for Amazon Warehouse Deals. They sent a das keyboard Ultimate inside a das keyboard Model S Professional for Mac box. The box had been opened. I assume someone else scammed them, then they scammed me. What sucks is that it ties up funds on my credit card until the return arrives at Amazon plus another several business days, and it wasted my time because you can't use the online return form for Amazon Warehouse Deals (actually, I suspect that form fails to work for most things, not just Warehouse Deals).

    This is the second time I've received the wrong item from online ordering in the last several months. Maybe brick-and-mortar stores have a fighting chance if companies like Amazon and NewEgg can't seem to send the items that were ordered. I know I've recently moved to buying locally at MicroCenter whenever possible for this reason. Paying sales tax and driving there on my way home from work is still less hassle than having to repackage an item and go to the UPS store and have my funds tied up just because an online vendor can't get its act together.

    On a positive note, I picked up the Magic Trackpad from the Apple Store at Twelve Oaks Mall. As usual, a very pleasant retail experience. In fact it has me leaning toward getting a Mac wired keyboard for this machine. It's a lot cheaper, it takes up less desk space, and if mom doesn't like it, I'll keep it for myself as my spare.

• February 4, 2013
  
  • hackintosh2
    The Seasonic X-660 660W power supply arrived. I installed it. I'm almost done with the internals for the moment, but I don't like the fans that came with the case and the power connector on the fan controller is flakey. I'd like to replace most of the 140mm case fans with Noctua NF-A14 FLX fans. Or at least the two mounted horizontally, and the rest could be Cougar CF-V14HB.

    I created a new SSDT with a turbo overclock to 4GHz. It works fine, and I never saw CPU temperatures get out of hand running all cores at full tilt. They levelled off around 55C.

    I set up Carbon Copy Cloner, and ran the first backup.

    I set up Hyperdock.

• February 3, 2013
  
  • hackintosh2
    I installed the CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Plus. I also installed the Western Digital 1TB drive, giving it a 300G partition for Carbon Copy Cloner backups and a 700G partition for Time Machine.

• February 2, 2013
  
  • hackintosh2
    I picked up the CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Plus CPU cooler and the Western Digital 1TB disk drive from Microcenter.

• January 31, 2013
  
  • hackintosh2
    Hackintosh 2 is alive. Using an old Thermaltake power supply, I got things running. Clover bootloader, OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 installed on a new Samsung 840 Pro Series 256 gigabyte SSD. There were some issues here with FakeSMC (I had to install the latest), and I had to make a minor tweak to Clover's config.plist (set GraphicsInjector to false). Other than that, things went smoothly. The OS installation was actually done by using Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my original hackintosh, since it was the fastest way to get everything copied over.

• January 29, 2013
  
  • hackintosh1
    I figured out the problem with my das keyboard and my BIOS. For whatever reason, I need to hold down the key of interest (F12 or DEL, for example) instead of repeatedly pressing it when the BIOS splash screen is up. This is fine for me, and might not be different than the past. I don't go into the BIOS very often.

• January 28, 2013
  
  • hackintosh1
    I bought a new Samsung 840 Pro Series 512 gigabyte SSD today. Mainly because the price dropped to $467.99, but also because I wanted the faster I/O and the longer warranty than I had with the Samsung 830 SSD. I also wanted the extra disk space; my Samsung 830 was 256 gigabytes, I will now have roughly double the SSD space. The Samsung 830 will go into my 2009 MacBook Pro, which has seemed very slow lately because I've grown accustomed to having SSD. I am in the process of cloning my Samsung 830 to the new 840 right now, using Carbon Copy Cloner. I am using a Kingwin USI-2535 to do the cloning. It is a simple adapter device that lets you plug an IDE or SATA drive into a USB 2.0 port. I looked at some USB 3.0 models, but given that the USB 3.0 is flakey at best on my hackintosh, I decided it wasn't worth the expense. The USI-2535 was dirt cheap at $15.99. I'm assuming it'll work dandy for my MacBook Pro too. It is slow, but it works and I don't expect to use it often.

    I also bought an iogear GBU521 USB Bluetooth adapter, since it supports Bluetooth 4.0 and reportedly works better than the Rocketfish RF-MRBTAD I have been using. This appears to be true; though I had to re-pair my Magic Trackpad after putting the GBU521 in place, it looks like I don't have to wait 30 seconds after wake-from-sleep to use my trackpad now. It starts working immediately after the USB hub in my das keyboard is initialized.

    Finally, I bought a Samsung 840 Pro Series 256 gigabyte SSD for the second hackintosh I'm building for mom. It was on sale at $224.99, as was the Fractal Design Arc Midi case I bought for her. I also bought an EVGA GT640 video card for her. She's not going to be playing any games, it'll work just fine.

    I finished migrating to the new Samsung 840 Pro SSD. One of the things I had forgotten... my installation settings for Clover. I used GPT boot0hfs, following the instructions for creating a FAT-32 filesystem on the EFI partition.

    Samsung 840 Pro performance... I'm seeing 467 MB/sec write, 515 MB/sec read. Not dramatically different than the Samsung 830, but a bit faster and I now have space to breathe.

    Once done, I reconfigured my CarbonCopyCloner scheduled tasks to back up the new SSD. I also started a TimeMachine backup to my MyBookLive.

    One strange thing happened in this process... my das keyboard is no longer able to make the BIOS stop before it jumps to the bootloader. I suspect it has something to do with having the new USB to Bluetooth adapter plugged in to the hub on the das keyboard. I will have to figure it out shortly. Since I needed to be able to get to the boot menu in the BIOS while setting up the new SSD, I plugged my old Unicomp keyboard into one of the front panel USB ports. That worked fine.

• January 3, 2013
  
  • mcplex
    I need to order a Middle Atlantic BRK20 to hold my Middle Atlantic rack drawers, along with the RKW-HD heavy-duty caster kit. I can get them from customavrack.com.

• December 21, 2012
  
  • www
    I finally got around to adding a chart for UPS status on the Site Health page. I've only been collecting this data since December 14, 2012. It is useful for tracking my power consumption and UPS load, and of course battery charge level and expected runtime if the AC power disappears.

• December 8, 2012
  
  • depot
    I decided I wanted to run my sitetrafficd daemon on depot to track traffic to and from it. In the process, I remembered that sitetrafficd assumed that the configured pcap filter always specified TCP-only traffic. So I fixed that issue, it will now happily record other IP traffic. So now it assumes that the pcap filter only allows IP packets, and that's fine; I don't really care about non-IP traffic.

    In the process, I discovered that GetLocalInterfaces() in my libDwm library did not work correctly on FreeBSD 9.1. So I had to fix it. It now works correctly and sitetrafficd is now running on depot, recording IP traffic totals and TCP handshake round-trip times.

• December 7, 2012
  
  • depot
    I decided I wanted to run my sitehealthd daemon on depot, to record historical disk usage, CPU utilization and CPU temperatures. It's running now. I'll worry about the front end later.

• December 5, 2012
  
  • depot
    I configured and started upsmon (as a client for now).

• oldria
  I configured and started upsmon (as a client for now).

• December 2, 2012
  
  • depot
    I inserted an old WD 74GB VelociRaptor drive in the first hot-swap bay that's connected to the IBM M1015. The system recognized it correctly:

            da0 at mps0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0
            da0:  Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
            da0: 150.000MB/s transfers
            da0: Command Queueing enabled
            da0: 70911MB (145226112 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 9039C)
            

    I then issued camcontrol stop da0 to stop the drive, and removed the drive. This also went fine:

            mps0: mpssas_alloc_tm freezing simq
            mps0: mpssas_remove_complete on handle 0x0009, IOCStatus= 0x0
            mps0: mpssas_free_tm releasing simq
            (da0:mps0:0:0:0): lost device - 0 outstanding, 1 refs
            (pass1:mps0:0:0:0): passdevgonecb: devfs entry is gone
            (da0:mps0:0:0:0): removing device entry
            

    Hence I believe I'm all set for adding drives to be used with ZFS.

    I installed smartmontools from ports, and enabled smartd in /etc/rc.conf. I configured the disks I want monitored in /etc/periodic.conf. I then started smartd.

• www
  I installed smartmontools from ports, and enabled smartd in /etc/rc.conf. I configured the disks I want monitored in /etc/periodic.conf. I then started smartd.

• oldria
  I installed smartmontools from ports, and enabled smartd in /etc/rc.conf. I configured the disks I want monitored in /etc/periodic.conf. I then started smartd.

• November 30, 2012
  
  • depot
    I finished modifying the handles on the Rosewill RSV-L4411 case to allow the case to be fully inserted into the rack. Since all I had for the job was my handheld jigsaw and Dremel, It's not pretty. But it's functional and this part of the handles is not visible when the case is in the rack.

    The SFF-8087 to SATA forward breakout cables arrived. I installed them and ziptied them neatly around the perimeter of the case so they don't have an adverse effect on the air flow.

    I put depot's case top on, installed the modified handles and put depot back in the rack. I believe I'm ready for pool drives.

• November 29, 2012
  
  • depot
    The IBM M1015 card arrived today. My first attempt at installing it failed, I think because FreeBSD attached the mfi driver to it. I wound up with a lot of 'mfi0: TIMEOUT...' messages and the kernel loops forever emitting them.

    I wound up flashing the IT sofware to the IBM M1015 by temporarily installing it in the motherboard of my hackintosh. I used FreeDOS and the sas2flsh utility, using 2108it.bin and mpt2sas2.rom as input files for sas2flsh. I had to do this because depot's motherboard has UEFI BIOS (and hence sas2flsh would not work on it). I could not get the EFI shell to work, and hence could not use sas2flsh.efi. Once flashed, I put it back in depot, and as near as I can tell, it's all OK. From dmesg:

            mps0:  port 0xe000-0xe0ff mem 0xf7dc0000-0xf7dc3fff,
            0xf7d80000-0xf7dbffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci1
            mps0: Firmware: 09.00.00.00, Driver: 14.00.00.01-fbsd
            mps0: IOCCapabilities: 1285c
            

    And camcontrol sees it:

            dwm@depot:/home/dwm% sudo camcontrol devlist -v
            scbus0 on mps0 bus 0:
            ...
            

    I have a plan to modify the handles on the RSV-L4411 case so I can get it fully into the rack on the rails without conflict. I modified one of them and it works.

• November 28, 2012
  
  • depot
    The Rosewill RSV-L4411 case arrived for depot. I installed the inner part of the rails on it, and adjusted the outer section of the rails in my rack to allow for the 1.125" that the case handles consume behind the front plate. I'll test the fitment soon.

    I removed the feet from the Rosewill RSV-L4411. I'm a bit surprised feet were included on a rackmount case, though I guess they'd be handy if I were using a shelf instead of sliding rails. I'll put them in the Middle Atlantic drawer that's installed in my rack in case I ever need them.

    I installed the power supply, motherboard and temporary boot drive in the Rosewill RSV-L4411. It appears that the IBM M1015 card will arrive tomorrow, at which point I'll install it in the motherboard and try to get it working. Amazon has not yet shipped my 1-meter SFF-8087 to SATA forward breakout cables yet, so I don't know if I'll receive them this week, despite it being a Prime order.

    Well, the Rosewill rack rails suck. The way the brackets are made, combined with the design of the handles on the RSV-L4411, means the case can't go all the way in to be flush with the rack and the rack screws will not reach. I'll have to modify things to make it work. Makes me wish I had just saved up for a Supermicro 3U case.

• November 27, 2012
  
  • depot
    I ordered an IBM M1015 card from eBay for $79.99 plus tax and shipping. This card is an SAS2008 card, with a pair of SFF-8087 connectors for up to 8 SATA drives. I'm hoping it has IT firmware loaded, but if not I will reflash it.

    I need cables for the IBM M1015 card. I don't think 18" cables will suffice for a super-clean installation in the Rosewill RSV-L4411 case, since the case is 25" deep. So I ordered a pair of 1-meter 3Ware CBL-SFF8087OCF-10M cables from Amazon. Once the IBM M1015 card and the cables arrive, I can finish the internal work on depot and hence be ready to install drives into the hot-swap bays. I may pull some of the 1TB drives from other machines and create a small zpool to test things. But my first production pool will be 6 drives in raidz2. I will later probably add a second 6-drive raidz2 pool, and use a Samsung 840 Pro Series SSD as my boot drive.

    It's worth noting that the critical I/O bottleneck for this machine will be the gigabit ethernet. It won't be doing anything itself other than acting as a network storage server, mostly for backups of all of my other machines and maybe for audio and video storage.

• November 26, 2012
  
  • depot
    The case for depot should arrive on Wednesday.

• November 25, 2012
  
  • depot
    I installed the rack rails for depot in the Startech 25U rack. Given that the RSV-L4411 case's holes for rack rails are centered vertically, I wish the rails had it's uppermost and lowermost holes set to line up when the rail is mounted to straddle two rack spaces. No matter, the two center holes on each face work in this manner, and should work fine. I am disappointed, however, that the recessed washers were not included. Others have had the same complaint. In the end, this means that the server will not sit flush.

• November 21, 2012
  
  • depot
    NewEgg processed my RMA for the Rosewill RSV-L4411 case. They haven't shipped the replacement yet, it's in the 'packaging' state (whatever that means). Hopefully they get it right this time. I'm not sure, but it appears they may have given me a $30 discount for my trouble. That would be welcome news. I'll know once it's all posted to my credit card.

    I installed nut for UPS monitoring. Of course I haven't bought new batteries for either of my Powerware 5115 UPS units yet. So for now I'll just be using it in slave mode; depot will be plugged in to the Powerware 5125, whose master is www.

• November 19, 2012
  
  • depot
    In tne interest of being prepared for the arrival of depot's case, I put the stuck CPU cooler on the ASRock H77 Pro4-M motherboard. I then connected the power supply and the 600G VelociRaptor drive and am about to try installing FreeBSD 9.1-RC3 via the USB memstick image. I'm waiting for the dd to my USB thumb drive to finish... I wish I had bought a speedier USB thumb drive for this kind of work.

    The motherboard has UEFI BIOS, and it looks like it's very speedy. That'll be nice for the occasions where I need to reboot. It will let me boot from a USB thumb drive (I checked), and it sees all of the RAM modules so at least I know they're all good as far as being recognized. The stock CPU cooler runs very quiet when the CPU is idle, which is good news. The power supply is very quiet at idle too. Not that it matters... I know the real noise from this machine will emanate from the hard drives and case fans.

    The dd of the memstick image completed, and I put the USB thumb drive in one of depot's rear ports. It booted fine and I performed the installation of FreeBSD 9.1-RC3. Everything went smoothly. Note that I consider this whole activity temporary... the 600G VelociRaptor drive is much larger than I need for a boot drive. But this is a good test of running a boot drive from the ASMedia SATA ports so that I can use the H77 SATA ports for raidz2 drives.

    I created a new kernel configuration (/sys/amd64/conf/depot) which just adds device coretemp to the GENERIC kernel. I want to be able to monitor CPU core temperatures.

    So, I'm all set to do some testing once the new case arrives. Of course I don't have array drives yet. I'll be buying those piecemeal over the next few months.

• November 17, 2012
  
  • mcplex
    I moved all of my equipment from the full-height rack to the new 25U rack. It fits fine, and I had room for a 5U drawer in the front since I decided to put my ethernet switch in the back. I left a little more than 4U for depot, since I installed a server shelf for ria and www and it has some space underneath it.

    I need to order some rack thumbscrews for my Middle Atlantic fan panels. I can get them directly from www.rackrelease.com.

• November 15, 2012
  
  • depot
    I dropped off the Rosewill RSV-L4500 4U case at the UPS Store for return to NewEgg. Tracking number is 1Z02319W9099161979. Hopefully it'll get there next week (estimated arrival at NewEgg is Wednesday 11/21/2012), and hopefully the correct product will arrive the following week.

    The ASRock H77 Pro4-M motherboard, 32G of DDR3 1333 memory, the Seasonic SS12II 430B power supply (430 watts), and a Western Digital WD6000HLHX 600G VelociRaptor hard drive arrived. All of these parts except the hard drive are for depot.

    I installed the CPU and the memory in the ASRock H77 Pro4-M motherboard. I have not yet installed the CPU cooler, only because I'm not sure I'll use the stock one and the motherboard won't fit back in its box with the CPU cooler on it. No sense in installing the cooler until I have a case to put it in.

    The StarTech 25U rack arrived via freight shipping today, and it appears to be intact. I'll know when I take it all out of the box and try to put it together.

    I quickly put together the StarTech 25U rack. It's all good. The only indication that it's refurbished: a few paint scratches and chips on some of the aluminum braces. It's a non-issue for me since this isn't a piece of furniture, it's a tool. It's not going to be placed in living space, but it looks very good. More importantly, it's much more functional for my purposes than my existing full-height racks. The one drawback: I can't see moving it out of the home on the casters when it's loaded... they're not strong enough. It's also worth noting that the first rack space is not at the floor of the rack, it's about 1.5" above it. That means I probably can't use my Powerware 5125 on the floor of the rack with no rails. I'm calling this a non-issue since I have other options.

    .

    I've decided that I want the CSB HRL634WF2 batteries from atbatt.com for my Powerware 5115 UPS units. Free shipping for orders over $75, and these particular batteries are 9Ah and designed for long-life and 260 full cycles.

• November 14, 2012
  
  • depot
    The CPU for depot arrived today. So did a Rosewill case, but it's the wrong one. :-( Newegg sent a Rosewill RSV-L4500, but I ordered an RSV-L4411. They are very different products, with very different price tags. The RSV-L4500 is about half the price and has no hot-swap drive bays. Hence I requested an RMA and a pre-paid shipping label since the fault was solely on their side. Sad this kind of mistake is made, especially when the model number of the case is written clearly in several locations on the outside of outer box (clearly visible). In fact I knew it was the wrong product without opening anything, but I opened it anyway to see if maybe they had repackaged. Unfortunately this is not the first time I've had a Newegg screw-up. I should probably start taking my business elsewhere as frequently as possible, just to avoid the headaches. Their prices are generally competitive, but historically they've made more mistakes than Amazon, CDW, TigerDirect, directron.com and others. What's annoying about this kind of issue: it sets me back several weeks, which pushes things into the holiday season. My time is very valuable, I don't like having to spend it talking to newegg to make them pay for return shipping (their on-line process wanted me to spend $60 of my own money for return shipping), waiting for them to send a shipping label via email, printing and attaching shipping labels and RMA forms and then hauling a very large box to the UPS Store just because newegg doesn't seem to be able to manage shipping the correct product. If I had been smart, I would have ordered a SuperMicro case from somewhere else (probably eBay). In the end I might wind up with SuperMicro drive cages anyway, depending on the quality of the Rosewill cages.

• mcplex
  The new StarTech 25U rack will arrive tomorrow via freight, which means I have to sit at home and wait for it. :-( My initial impression from the fact that it's a break-down rack of reasonable size was that it would ship UPS Ground in more than one piece. I was mistaken; it's coming UPS Freight in one box. The bad news is that due to newegg's screw-up (they sent me the wrong 4U case for depot), I won't be able to completely set it up for several weeks. I also won't be able to easily bench-test depot's hardware because I don't have a case to put it in and now won't have one for several weeks.

  I removed the batteries from my old Axxium 1500 2U rackmount UPS. They can be replaced with the same batteries I used in my Powerware 5125: Werker WKA12-9F2. I hate the pricing at BatteriesPlus... they want $42 each and I need 4 of them. The only advantage to getting them locally versus online is warranty and recycling of the old batteries. atbatt.com has much better pricing (more than $10 less per battery if I compare the exact same battery: a Genesis NP7-12) and has free shipping for orders over $75. Of course, I'm not all that excited about reviving my Axxium 1500 at the moment, since its only connection is a serial port. The Powerware 5115 units that I own have USB ports (though they are not HID compliant). It's also worth noting that since my load is quite low, I don't need additional UPS at the moment. Even if my load doubles with the new server, I'll still be at 20% load. This makes me think that I should wait a bit before buying more UPS batteries, and instead continue working toward finishing depot's build. Most of my power issues are of very short duration (seconds) or very long duration (many hours). I can't cover many hours no matter what I do with UPS, but I can cover 20 minutes rather easily with only my Powerware 5125. If there's a place I could use more UPS at the moment, it'd be in my office since my desktop easily consumes more power than my servers (dual monitors, power-hungry GPU, etc.).

• November 13, 2012
  
  • mcplex
    I installed, configured and started nut (Network UPS Tools) on my web server. It is currently monitoring my Powerware 5125 UPS. I am using the CGI scripts for now, but will likely write my own Wt programs later. The good news is that with most of my rack plugged in to the UPS, my load is only 10% and my calculated runtime is over 44 minutes. My entire rack is using 151 watts of power. That is of course without depot, which hasn't been built yet. But I consider this a pretty good number given that I'm running two Intel Atom hosts with a total of 6 hard drives, a KVM, a 17" LCD monitor (asleep), a gigabit ethernet switch and my cable modem.

• November 12, 2012
  
  • depot
    I'm expecting the CPU for depot to arrive on Wednesday. Other parts should arrive on Thursday. On Thursday night I'll see if the case fits in 4U with the rack rails installed. I read a review that complained that the case doesn't really fit in 4U with the rails installed, since the rails are centered on the case. That may have been the particular user's issue with a particular rack. I'm hoping I don't have that problem, since I'd like to have more than 3U of space remaining in the new rack after installing depot. Of course, there's no particular reason to keep the tower cases I'm using now for ria and www; those could easily be 2U or 3U rackmount cases. There are a couple of iStarUSA 3U cases that I like that are not terribly expensive and have good cooling setups. Getting good cooling in a 2U case winds up being fairly expensive, and I'm well aware of the noise created as a result since I previously had a pair of 2U cases in my rack with dual Xeon motherboards.

• mcplex
  The new rack's estimated arrival is between Noverber 26th and December 3rd. Ugh, that's a long time from now, but I guess it's not unexpected given that it's coming via UPS freight. On the upside, it will give me time to finalize the new layout.

• November 11, 2012
  
  • depot
    I downloaded memstick images of FreeBSD 9.0 and FreeBSD 9.1-RC2. FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE is behind schedule, it was supposed to be released a couple of days ago. I suspect we won't see it until December.

    I'm leaning toward an IBM M1015 card for ZFS. It will give me 8 SATA ports, and is readily available on eBay for cheap. To reflash the card to IT-mode, I can use the instructions here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=12767.msg124393#msg124393

• November 10, 2012
  
  • depot
    I ordered enough parts to start the build of depot. A Rosewill RSV-L4411 case (12 hot-swap bays), the Rosewill RSV-R26LX rack rail kit, an ASRock H77 Pro4-M motherboard, an Intel i5-2405S CPU, 32G of DDR3 1333 memory, a Seasonic SS12II 430B power supply (430 watts), and a Western Digital WD6000HLHX 600G VelociRaptor hard drive. The hard drive is overkill, and will probably be used in my hackintosh instead, but it was cheap since it was part of a bundle deal with the Rosewill RSV-L4411 case. I chose the i5-2405S for its 65W TDP, to avoid too much heat in the case while still having 4 cores and integrated graphics. The ASRock motherboard isn't my ideal choice, but it has VGA output and a PS/2 port for keyboard, both of which I need for my existing KVM. Sadly, it doens't have any PCI xPress 2.0 x8 slots, but since I'm not using a graphics card, I'm hoping I can put a SATA controller card in the PCI 3.0 x16 slot. I have yet to decide which card I want. I don't need or want RAID, since I'll be using ZFS with raidz2. I've also not yet decided which drives I'll be using. WD Red makes sense, except that their warranty is only 3 years. There's also the question of size; I need 2TB drives at a minimum, but can I use 3TB drives? This is really a question of space (will the 3TB drives fit in the hot-swap trays), and will it mean waiting too long for resilvering and scrubbing?

    Once the new rack and server parts arrive, I'll basically be set for the next several years with respect to home computing, with the exception of an HTPC. I'll probably buy a Mac mini for my HTPC.

• mcplex
  I finished rearranging my rack in the basement, and have it in the configuration I will use when the new rack arrives. There are two things on my wish list after the new rack arrives: a Middle Atlantic TD3 rackmount drawer (to hold rack screws, boot media, cable ties, etc.) and a Middle Atlantic LT-GN-PNL rackmount panel with dual gooseneck LED lights to light the back of the rack when I'm working on things back there.

  One problem I notived when working on the rack: the keyboard port for my Belkin KVM is intermittent. When the new rack arrives, I'll take the KVM apart and see if I can replace that port.

• November 9, 2012
  
  • mcplex
    I started rearranging my rack in the basement, in preparation for space reduction and a backup server. I then caved and bought a StarTech RK2536BKF rack. It is a 25U rack and will replace my existing 42U rack. I don't need more than 25U, and the RK2536BKF is better designed for my needs; the front door is vented, the rear door is mesh and the top is vented. I wasn't really prepared to buy it, but I couldn't pass up the price for a refurbished one via Amazon. The normal list price is $942.99 plus shipping, I paid $386.99 plus shipping. The shipping was $111.55, so my total was $498.54.

    Since I had not looked at my Powerware 5115 UPS units in a long time, I checked... they're the 1400VA/1000W models, which is good news. I can get new batteries for them and be in very good shape for UPS. At the moment my power consumption in the rack isn't very high since the two machines that run 7x24 are both miniITX systems with low power consumption (though I haven't measured it). Then there's the cable modem, the gigabit ethernet switch, the KVM and KVM keyboard/monitor. These are all low power devices since the KVM monitor goes to sleep when I'm not using it. My plan is to put ria on one of the Powerware 5115 units, www on the other Powerware 5115 unit, and everything else on the Powerware 5125 (including the new backup server).

    The reason I'm rearranging right now: I want my layout to be planned well in advance of receiving the new rack, so I can just move everything once the new rack arrives and not have to think about it at that time. This will minimize my downtime and let me put the old rack on craigslist shortly thereafter.

• November 8, 2012
  
  • mcplex
    I bought Werker WKA12-9F2 batteries for my Powerware 5125 2U rackmount UPS and installed them. After powering up, I discovered that the UPS is complaining about ground. This means one of two things: bad ground or reversed hot and neutral wiring in the outlet. I'll check it tomorrow night.

• November 7, 2012
  
  • mcplex
    The HP TFT7600 KVM console arrived. It was a very good deal; $
    89 with free shipping. List price for a new one is $1699. The one I received is in very good cosmetic condition and works fine. I'm so grateful for eBay! This will help me reduce the clutter and space in my rack, so I can move to a smaller rack.

    I need to print a cheat sheet on adhesive-backed vinyl so I'll remember the hot-key sequences for my KVM. When I move to a smaller rack, it won't be easy to use the channel changing button on the front of my Belkin KVM when the keyboard/monitor is extended for use.

    I pulled the batteries from my Powerware 5125 2U rackmount UPS since they need to be replaced. They're Portalac PX12090. Batteries Plus shows a 7.2Ah battery as the replacement. I think that sucks, since the PX12090 is a 9Ah rated battery. Hence I think the more appropriate replacement is the Werker WKA12-9F2. I bought some of these for my APC XS 1300 not long ago, so I took one out of the XS 1300 to measure it. They will fit. The WKA12-9F2 is $42 at the local store. I need four of them, so the total comes to $168.

    I also need new batteries for my Powerware 5115 1U rackount UPS units. The Werker WKA6-7.2F will fit, but it's rated for only 7.2Ah versus the 9Ah Panasonic UP-RW0645CH1 batteries that are in them right now. Each of my 1U rackount UPS takes 6 of these batteries. The Werker WKA6-7.2F is $24 at my local Batteries Plus, so the total comes to $288 plus tax. At the moment I don't really need both of these UPS units online, so I could just buy 6 batteries for $144 plus tax.

• November 1, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I finally got around to installing the BMW TIS and ETK under the Windows XP virtual machine on my hackintosh. The trick to getting both the MINI and BMW parts in the ETK is to use the 'denver78' password instead of the 'berlin56' password during installation. I continue to hate the java interface in the new versions of the ETK, but I'll live with it. I installed the 8/2007 version of the ETK and the 12/2007 version of the TIS.

• mcplex
  I am still looking at options to hold my Middle Atlantic TD rackmount drawers that are currently in a full-height rack I'd like to sell. I'm starting to think that my best option is a Middle Atlantic BRK20, since it looks better than the other options I've considered and it is a better match to my Middle Atlantic studio furniture racks. I'd add the RKW-HD heavy duty caster set.

• October 28, 2012
  
  • mcplex
    I bought an HP TFT7600 KVM console via eBay. The list price is $1679, but I paid $189 including shipping. While my ancient black and white 9" IBM VGA monitor and a spare keyboard has been OK for my KVM for a long time, it's far from convenient and it takes up a lot of space in my rack. I'm looking to migrate to a shorter rack, and to sell both of my 42U racks. Having a 1U slide-out KVM console with a 17" screen greatly reduces the space I need.

    My second rack is holding 16U of Middle Atlantic rackmount drawers right now, along with my old waveform generator and oscilloscope. I intend to replace that with a shorter, shallower rack. The Middle Atlantic rackmount drawers are only 15" deep, so using a deep computer rack is a tremendous waste of space. Buying a pair of shorter, shallower racks will let me sell the second 42U rack as well as both of my SKB road cases (currently holding more Middle Atlantic rackmount drawers). Though I might keep the SKB road cases, they're sort of nice for holding 12U of Middle Atlantic rackmount drawers.

    So, what do I want as a shorter rack for my computers? I need full depth here since I intend to put a 4U case in it as my backup/storage server. A 24U would be just about ideal. The unfortunate thing... shipping. Most places won't ship a rack to a residence for a reasonable price, because they use freight shipping. So for now I may just buy a 21U Royal Racks A/V rack for my Middle Atlantic drawers, and keep one of my tall racks until later.

    A Norco C-24U would serve my purposes. The drawback: the casters are a joke. Better would be a Startech 25U 36-inch knock-down rack, which is similar to my existing racks but shorter and with mesh rear door. Another option would be to make my own rack out of hardwood plywood with a butcher-block top. It would of course be heavy, but I already own very good casters for the job.

• October 23, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I arrived home today to find my hackintosh in a hung state, and it would not reboot due to the filesystem on the SSD being corrupted. I booted from my Carbon Copy clone disk and repartitioned the SSD and started a restore from my clone backup. I had more crashes, and sometimes was unable to boot. Verbose mode from the bootloader showed crashes at various points, which usually leads me to believe I have a RAM problem. I removed the DIMM from slot 1 on the motherboard and saw the same problems. I removed the DIMM from slot 4 and so far am not having any problems restoring my SSD. 75 gigabytes restored so far in 25 minutes, with about 50 gigabytes to go. Thank goodness I'm good about maintaining backups!

    This is one of those areas where I'm irked that Apple continues to use HFS and abandoned ZFS over licensing issues. HFS remains fairly easy to corrupt, journaled or not. A bad DIMM shouldn't result in the loss of the filesystem. I should also be able to force a filesystem to be mounted read-write if I can mount it read-only. I was able to mount the filesystem on the SSD as read-only, but for the life of me I could not figure out how to mount it read-write. That meant I had to erase it just so I could make it a target for Carbon Copy Cloner.

    I hope I can return the bad DIMM to MicroCenter, I don't really have time for an RMA. A new module is $45 and in stock.

    The slowness of my OS clone drive is annoying. It's a Western Digital Caviar Green. Not so bad for backups and restores, but it's somewhat painful to use as a boot drive, especially compared to the SSD. I really should replace it with a 7,200 or 10,000 rpm drive. But as long as my backups continue to work and I don't completely lose my SSD, I'm O.K.

• October 4, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I finally got around to installing the Inland USB 3.0 PCIe card. It appears to work fine, at least with USB 2.0 devices. I don't have any USB 3.0 devices to try.

• mcplex
  I bought another Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 motherboard from Micro Center. This is exactly the same as the board in my first hackintosh. I bought 16G of memory for it, and an Intel i5 2500K CPU. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with it yet, but the board was only $60 and since I know it will work as a hackintosh, I couldn't pass it up. It may wind up being built into a hackintosh as a Christmas gift for one of my loved ones. Alternatively, it might wind up as the board for the NAS I intend to build, but it's overkill CPU-wise for that task and I don't really _need_ a network storage box at the moment; I'm nowhere near being out of disk space on any of my machines, and that's with nightly backups (for my existing hackintosh, in triplicate). I've actually been thrilled with the Western Digital MyBook Live for backups, and will likely buy more of them. While they're not super fast, they are inexpensive, portable, easy to configure, low power, and easy to find in local stores as well as online. I will eventually build a FreeNAS box to consolidate my backups (using raidz2), and of course use more reliable drives than the Caviar Green that's in the MyBook Live. But there's a lot to be said for small, inexpensive boxes that use very little electricity and work just fine for backups. The only real downside is capacity since they're single-drive.

• September 21, 2012
  
  • mcplex
    I installed the 16-port gigabit ethernet switch in the basement rack. I anticipated needing to replace the Cat5 run to my office with the Cat5E cable I bought, but it turns out that the Cat5 works fine for my purposes. My only real need is to have my backups run at disk rate, and it appears that's not a problem now. I can write 40 megabytes per second (320 megabits/sec) from my desktop in my office to my server in the basement, and that's all I can expect from the slow drives and CPU in my backup server. It's also more than 3 times faster than I was able to do with 100baseTX switches.

    At the moment I know that I'm somewhat constrained by the slowness of the Lnx2Mac ethernet driver I'm using in my hackintosh. It has no support for jumbo frames, which puts some constraints on my network bandwidth. In fact the Realtek 8111 chipset doesn't support jumbo frames. If I want to do something about it, it appears my best option is an HP NC360T 412648-B21 from eBay. I don't really want to occupy my second PCIEX16 slot with it, so I'd need to slightly modify the card to fit in one of the PCIEX1 slots. Not a big deal, and I'd normally say it's not worth it except for the fact that I'd really like to migrate my whole LAN to jumbo frames. The HP card also has support for checksum offload, and the hardware supports TCP segmentation offload though I'm not sure the OS X driver uses it.

    The issue here isn't whether or not I can saturate my LAN; I can, as shown with iperf:

            dwm@www:/home/dwm% iperf -c hackintosh -i 1
            ------------------------------------------------------------
            Client connecting to hackintosh, TCP port 5001
            TCP window size: 32.5 KByte (default)
            ------------------------------------------------------------
            [ 3] local 192.168.168.59 port 44223 connected with hackintosh port 5001
            [ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
            [ 3]  0.0- 1.0 sec   108 MBytes   907 Mbits/sec
            [ 3]  1.0- 2.0 sec   112 MBytes   942 Mbits/sec
            [ 3]  2.0- 3.0 sec   112 MBytes   942 Mbits/sec
            [ 3]  3.0- 4.0 sec   112 MBytes   941 Mbits/sec
            [ 3]  4.0- 5.0 sec   112 MBytes   941 Mbits/sec
            [ 3]  5.0- 6.0 sec   112 MBytes   942 Mbits/sec
            [ 3]  6.0- 7.0 sec   112 MBytes   941 Mbits/sec
            [ 3]  7.0- 8.0 sec   112 MBytes   941 Mbits/sec
            [ 3]  8.0- 9.0 sec   112 MBytes   941 Mbits/sec
            [ 3]  9.0-10.0 sec   112 MBytes   940 Mbits/sec
            [ 3]  0.0-10.0 sec  1.09 GBytes   937 Mbits/sec
            

    The issue here is the amount of work the CPU needs to do on both sides. It's a high packet rate. I think I'll live with it for now, since I'm mostly only concerned about data transfer to what are slow disk drives. And at the moment I'm just happy that the new switches seem to work just dandy and are not a factor in my network bandwidth. And I'm happy to know that the wiring I did in the house years ago is working perfectly; TCP at 940 Mbits/sec is fantastic.

• September 19, 2012
  
  • mcplex
    I ordered a second 16-port gigabit ethernet switch from Amazon. It was on sale for $59.99, and is the same as the first one I ordered earlier this month: a Zyxel GS1100-16. This should help relieve some of the issues I've been having with the time it takes for my network backups to complete. Of course I also ordered new Cat6 and Cat5e patch cables since my existing cables in the basement are only Cat5. I also ordered a 75 ft. Cat5E cable that I'll snip to replace the run from the basement to my office.

    Fingers crossed that the time it takes for my level 0 backups to complete will be reduced significantly.

    I'm still saving up for a NAS box, and deciding what I really need. Ideally, something that will last at least 5 years. I think there's no question that I'll run FreeBSD and use ZFS, but the downside of using a ZFS RAID-Z configuration is the RAM required. I can't just use a MiniITX motherboard with only 2 RAM slots, since it's likely too restrictive RAM-wise. I think I want 32G of RAM, and ideally I'd have 6 SATA III ports on the motherboard. Not that I expect many individual drives to exceed SATA II rates, but SATA II is a fairly old spec at this point and 5 years from now it'll probably be considered antiquated for hard drives. It already is for SSD.

    .

• September 12, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    It's only been a couple of days, but the new gigabit ethernet switch is working fine. I have not tried to quantify its performance, but I'm happy with it. I will buy a second one for the basement later this month. It was inexpensive and makes my computing life a little easier.

• September 7, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I ordered a gigabit ethernet switch from Amazon, along with some Cat5e patch cables. Given my need to do network backups of a lot of data these days (from my hackintosh and my MacBook Pro), this was long overdue. If the switch I bought works well, I'll order another one for the basement. I've been getting by with 100baseT switches for many years, but the backup times for TimeMachine over 100baseT are unacceptable. It took almost 7 hours to do a full backup of my laptop to my new WD MyBook Live, and it takes equally long to do a full backup of my hackintosh over 100baseT. It's simple arithmetic, and I know my networked drives can handle much higher write rates than what's achievable over 100baseT.

• September 4, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    The keycaps for the daskeyboard Model S Professional for Mac arrived from wasdkeyboards.com, along with a pair of wire keycap puller tools and the O-rings to cushion the bottom of the keystroke. I installed all of the o-rings and then installed the keycaps. So far, I like the keycaps and the O-rings. The keycaps are an order of magnitude easier to read than the original daskeyboard keycaps, and I think the O-rings are going to teach me to type a little more lightly. They also reduce the noise from the keyboard without losing the click of the Cherry MX blue switches. For me this is a better setup than Cherry MX brown switches. Sort of the best of several worlds... click of Cherry MX blue, almost as quiet overall as Cherry MX brown, and there's cushioning when bottoming out the switches that gives me some of the benefits of Cherry MX black switches.

    We'll see how I feel about this setup after I've used the new setup for a week or two. I do still dislike how cramped parts some areas of the keyboard seem when compared to my old Unicomp buckling spring keyboard. The control keys in particular, since I'm a 20-year emacs user and use emacs keybindings in a number of places (not just in emacs).

• August 30, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I bought Office 2011 for Mac via the Lear (my place of work) program. My assigned Product ID is 03347-018-8840762-02342. My activation key was FDV83-WC894-26T47-PMCWH-8D92P.

• August 27, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    The keycaps for the daskeyboard Model S Professional for Mac shipped from wasdkeyboards.com. To be perfectly accurate... the shipping label was created, but it looks like UPS hasn't picked up the box yet. I was hoping that they would be here by Friday, but that's probably unrealistic. Given that this weekend is a holiday weekend, I might not see them until next Tuesday.

    In any event, I'll be thrilled to replace the keycaps with the ones from wasdkeyboards.com. It will resolve my issues and I can go back to not having a lamp shining on my keyboard.

• August 26, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    Having grown tired of the hard-to-read printing on the daskeyboard Model S Professional for Mac keyboard, I ordered custom keycaps for it from wasdkeyboards.com. You can see my design on their website here, and I saved a screenshot here. I had no need for colors, hence I adhered to a monochrome theme. I went with white for all normal keys that produce output in text editors, light gray for most modifier keys, and dark gray for the keys that do something special in combination with the function key near the right control key. Note that I used larger than normal fonts where possible, to make it easier to read the keys in a dimly lit office. I also used the correct symbols on the modifiers that are used by OS X. This makes it a little easier for me to map to them when I see them shown for a hotkey in an OS X menu.

    I also ordered the wire keycap puller and a set of the 40A o-ring dampeners with .4mm travel reduction. I may or may not use the o-ring dampeners, depending on how they feel. My hope is that they reduce the shock to my right hand when I bottom out the keys, without adversely affecting the feel of the keyboard. I think I'll like them, but if not I just won't use them. At a minimum they'll probably be useful in training me ot not bottom out the keys.

• August 25, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I enabled TRIM on my Samsung 830 SSD by using Trim Enabler from groths.org. So far, so good, but it's only been a couple of hours.

• August 21, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    The daskeyboard Model S Professional for Mac keyboard arrived from Amazon. I swapped out my Unicomp and swapped in the daskeyboard. The USB hub works as I intended, with my Rocketfish USB to Bluetooth micro-adapter plugged in. I also moved my Razer Naga mouse to the second port on the keyboard's hub, since I don't use it full-time and this makes it easy to unplug and stash in a drawer when it's not in use. And of course all of this freed up one USB port on my hackintosh's case.

    This is the first keyboard I've owned with Cherry MX blue key switches. My first impression is that I like it a lot. It's much lighter touch than my Unicomp, and considerably quieter. However, as expected, I hate the printing on the keycaps; it's too small, and I prefer capital letters over small letters. I'm also certain that the printing is going to wear off quickly, like every white-on-black laser-etched-and-filled keyboard I've owned. There's a reason Unicomp only offered it for a very short time; the longevity is abysmal compared to dye-sublimated keycaps or even light-colored keys with just laser etching.

• August 19, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I ordered the daskeyboard Model S Professional for Mac keyboard from Amazon. I hate the fact that the keys are black with white-filled laser etching that will inevitably wear off (quickly given how much I type). So assuming I like the keyboard, I'll buy new keycaps for it (a light color with laser etching). Every keyboard I've owned with white lettering on black caps has had the lettering wear off quickly.

    Short story made long... as much as I love my buckling spring keyboards like the one I use now, there are times when I want something slightly lighter in touch and a little bit quieter. I still want clicking for touch typing, just a slightly lighter touch. There isn't a chance in hell I'm ever going to use a rubber-dome type keyboard for daily use, I've been using buckling spring keyboards like the IBM Model M for over 20 years and IMHO non-mechanical keyboards just suck to type on for long periods. There's really no comparison in terms of keyboard quality. Rubber-dome keyboards are inexpensive, but they also suck. In fact any keyboard that requires full depression of the keys sucks for typing. I can live with the keyboard on my MacBook Pro, but I'd never want to use it for long coding sessions.

    Many years ago, I was a passenger in a car accident that damaged a bunch of cartilage in my right hand. I also had two reconstructive surgeries on my right thumb for a Bennett's fracture. For this reason, I can't tolerate keyboards that require me to bottom out the keyswitch to have a character transmitted. They cause daily pain, not to mention the frustration of their lack of longevity. A quality mechanical keyboard will last through decades of daily use, and not require one to bototm out the keys to get a character. They also never produce double hits.

    If I were buying for an operating system other than OS X, I'd probably buy a keyboard with Topre switches. They're probably the nicest available for typing, and they're available in 55g and 45g weights. However, I've not seen one made for the Mac, so they have the wrong labelling and are missing some of the special functions on the top row of function keys. I've been living with such issues for a long time using my Unicomp buckling spring keyboards, but I want to have the functions as I'm now using my hackintosh as my primary desktop. I also want the extra USB ports on the daskeyboard; one will hold my USB to Bluetooth micro-adapter for my magic trackpad, and the other will either be used for USB flash drives or for a Mobee Power Bar to keep my Magic Trackpad charged at all times. I've been using AA alkaline batteries in my Magic Trackpad, and it conusmes a pair of them about once a month. Given that I essentially never move it and it sits right next to my keyboard, I could use a 6" USB to micro USB cable plugged into the keyboard to keep my Magic Trackpad charged at all times. On the rare occasion I need to use my Razer Naga mouse (mostly when playing a game), I'll unplug it. That happens less than once a month. The same injury that causes me to suffer when using a rubber dome keyboard causes significantly more suffering when using a mouse; it's the reason that I used a Logitech Wireless Trackman Marble for over 10 years before changing my primary desktop to OS X.

    It's worth noting that the USB ports on the daskeyboard are fairly low current. There's no chance of using one to charge an iPhone or iPad in a reasonable amount of time. But it should work fine to power the Mobee Power Bar since I'll leave it plugged in all of the time; it'll essentially just be trickle charging the Mobee Power Bar round-the-clock. Even if it doesn't, it'll be nice to have my USB to Bluetooth micro-adapter literally inches from my Magic Trackpad; it completely eliminates any potential problems with reception.

    I know the daskeyboard surface attracts dust and fingerprints like a magnet. I have a cover designed in CAD to address that issue, which will be cut from anodized aluminum. I may or may not powdercoat it with a textured powder.

• August 18, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I removed the batteries from my old Best Fortress 1425 rackmount UPS, and cleaned up the inside of its case (vacuum, then the blowgun at 90PSI). I then went to the local Batteries Plus and bought new batteries and installed them. This UPS is ancient, and hence doesn't have an HID-compliant USB port. However, it has true sine wave output and is a rackmount. That's more convenient for my office since I have Middle Atlantic studio racks. I mounted it in the rack to the right of my desk and am now using it.

• August 13, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I tried using the CalDigit USB 3.0 driver by installing it from MultBeast 5.0.1. With the lynx2mac ethernet driver, I lose my network after sleep/wake (ifconfig en0 shows no IP address assigned, though everything looks OK in System Preferences). With the RealtekRTL81xx ethernet driver, I get almost immediate crashes when using the Razer Naga mouse.

    I've gone back to using the LaCie PXHCD driver (from the LaCie web site, not from MultiBeast 4.6.x) and the lynx2mac ethernet driver. I do sometimes have to unplug/replug my Razer Naga mouse after sleep/wake, but the OS doesn't crash and I don't lose my network.

• August 12, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I installed XQuartz 2.7.2. I thought I had installed it earlier, but apparently that was on Lion or my MacBook Pro.

• August 11, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I installed Picasa and SketchUp from Google. I also installed FrontDesigner from Front Panel Express.

    Under my VM for Windows XP, I installed eMachineShop 1.76 from emachineshop.com.

• August 9, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I moved /System/Library/Extensions/AppleTyMCEDriver.kext to my home directory so I could change my system definition to MacPro 5,1. This let me load the AGPM kext so I could check my video card's power management. I added an entry for my GTX 570 HD in /System/Library/Extensions/AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext/Contents/Info.plist. Yes, power management is working fine. I see no significant difference in idle temperature, but I didn't expect it; my idle GPU temperature is around 50C, which is expected given that I don't have a ton of airflow over the card. The GPU fan never spins up fast because it doesn't need to run fast. In 3D tests like Unigine, my GPU never gets anywhere near the thermal limit.

    I bought Carbon Copy Cloner. It works well for what I need, and I intend to keep using it.

• August 8, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I removed the two 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green drives from my old FreeBSD desktop. They were not being used there except to hold music. I put them into my hackintosh and will be using them for secondary backup for now, using Carbon Copy Cloner. While these drives are slow, and not the most reliable drives, they'll suffice for now. I have no plans to disable Time Machine, I'll continue to use it to back up to one of my machines in the basement. For now I'm using the trial version of Carbon Copy cloner to see how it goes. If it works as desired, I'll pay for it. I'm using the first drive to backup my data drive. The second drive is being used to back up my SSD which has the operating system. On this second drive, I'll install Chimera so I can boot from it if/when needed.

    I ran the first backup of my OS drive. It took about 37 minutes, 30 minutes of which was data transfer. So in the worst case (SSD completely full), I expect a full backup to take approximately 67 minutes (right now my SSD is only half full). That's significantly faster than a full backup to my low-power machine in the basement.

    I installed the Chimera bootloader on the backup drive, then booted from it by selecting it in my BIOS. It booted fine. It was slow as molasses compared to my SSD, but that was expected. What matters is that it works.

• August 7, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    My first hackintosh is now working essentially flawlessly. Sleep and wake work, my CMOS doesn't reset on reboot, and I don't have graphics power management issues. I would like to try AGPM again, to see if I can make my GTX570 run a little cooler much of the time. But at the moment, the machine works essentially exactly like a real Apple machine.

    As a result, I repartitioned my 500G drive that formerly contained my Lion installation, and will now use it as a data drive. I started transferring my music collection from my old FreeBSD desktop, and when it's done I'll pull the two 1G drives out of that machine to use for backups in the hackintosh. I moved my iTunes Media folder to the 500G drive.

• August 6, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I discovered a new problem with sleep/wake. If I reboot after having sleep/wake cycles, the CMOS gets reset. The fix was in the forums:

    sudo perl -pi -e 's|\x75\x30\x89\xd8|\xeb\x30\x89\xd8|' /System/Library/Extensions/AppleRTC.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleRTC

    This basically just causes the code to jump over the checksum updates.

    I also bumped my turbo clocks to 42 on all cores. I rarely run my CPU hard, but when I do I want it to run at 4.2GHz. 4.2GHz is mild and safe, given that I have the Corsair H100. My Geekbench score is back to 15,144.

    I updated my VMWare Fusion to 4.1.3 in order to run it on Mountain Lion.

• August 5, 2012
  
  • MacBook Pro
    I installed OS X Mountain Lion on my 2009 MacBook Pro 17". It went smoothly.

• August 4, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    So far, so good with Mountain Lion. I haven't yet had a problem with sleep/wake, as long as I don't overclock (turbo disabled). If I enable turbo in my BIOS, I sometimes get the 'Computer must be restarted' message coming out of sleep. However, I will play with it some more now that I've installed the AppleRTC Patch for CMOS Reset.

    One issue I haven't chased down and fixed... it appears that I don't really have power management of the GPU. HWMonitor is reporting it at above 50C all of the time. Duh, that's basically what I expect when using MacPro 3,1 as my system definition. I'm going to stick with it for now, since my sleep/wake is working better.

• August 3, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I picked up the remaining 16G of Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz memory, bringing my total to 32G. All memory slots are now filled, so I don't have to worry about the slots getting dirty. This is also the maximum amount of memory I can put in the motherboard.

    I also picked up the Samsung 830 256G SSD and another 8G USB stick for UniBeast 1.5.1. I installed UniBeast, and proceeded to install Mountain Lion on the Samsung 830 256G SSD.

    I had a few glitches along the way, mostly with my DSDT not working initially. I think this was due to Safari not saving it properly (tonymac should ditch the stupid menu-only selection on the website). Obviously I had to install my SSDT to get SpeedStep to work correctly. I also had to install the AppleRTC Patch for CMOS Reset, else my CMOS would be reset at every reboot. And unlike Lion, I decided to use toleda's new patched AppleHDA and ALC889 for audio, which works just dandy.

    One very cool think about Mountain Lion... my GTX570 video card just works, without trying to install the OpenCL enabler from MultiBeast. It also appears to be glitch-free after sleep and wake. I hope this remains true, since I continued to have problems with wake from sleep under Lion.

• July 24, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I installed Calibre so I can read my iBook content on my desktop or laptop. Don't ask me why Apple doesn't release an iBook application for OS X. The stuff I need to read from iBooks is free Apple content; it's damn silly that some of their programming documentation is only available via iBooks.

• July 23, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    The edge trim for my window cutout arrived today. I installed it. It makes my window cutout look much better.

    I've decided on my additional case lighting. I want the NFLS-SS-A300-1/2M-S (amber) and NFLS-SS-WW300-1/2M-S (warm white) from superbrightleds.com. The white strip will go on the top of the case and the amber will go in the bottom. I wouldn't mind having white in both places, but I don't think I want the brightness of the white hitting my eyes when I walk by my hackintosh.

    My APC Back-UPS XS 1300 continues to show 0 minutes of runtime, and I can't seem to find the cable for it. Not that it really matters; PowerChute isn't available for anything but very old versions of OS X, and from what I've read the APC units don't really work with OS X. The unit functions, in terms of the inverter coming on when I pull the plug from the wall, but I have no way of having my hackintosh shut down when runtime gets low. I've decided I'm going to buy a new CyberPower OR1500PFCRT2U from Amazon. It's a 2U rackmount, line-interactive with pure sine output, for a reasonable price ($410). Importantly, it has an HID-compliant USB port that works with OS X.

• July 22, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I am now using the rolling platform, and I like it a lot. I moved my desk a bit and put the hackintosh to the left of my desk for easier access. I am still fighting some sleep issues, and I suspect the IOUSBFamily Rollback is part of the issue. Since that rollback had no positive effect for me, I'm going to restore my previous IOUSBFamily from Time Machine.

    I bought new batteries for my APC Back-UPS XS 1300. Normally I only use this to power my monitors, but right now I'm also using it to power the hackintosh. Despite the fact that its output is not a sine wave, it's better than taking the power bumps that seem to be frequent this month. I need to buy new batteries for several more of my UPS systems (all rackmounted systems). At the moment the important one is the Best Fortress 1425 that I normally use for my desktop. I need 4 batteries for it, the cost will be around $160.

• printing
  I moved my HP 4050TN to the spare bedroom so I could reclaim some space in my office. I'll reconnect in the next few weeks, I haven't decided yet how I'm going to do it but I'll probably use an Apple Airport Express.

• July 21, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I put the third coat of polyurethane on the rolling platform. This is the first coat that wasn't absorbed by the wood. Hopefully I won't need a fourth coat.
    Sleep/wake seems to be working again. I got it working by loading optimized settings in my BIOS and then didn't change my clock multiplier. We'll see how long it works.

    My iPhone wasn't being seen by iTunes. Per suggestion in the tonymacx86 forum, I tried the IOUSBFamily Rollback, but it made no difference. I am still loading the NEC USB3 driver. What does seem to work... using one of the powered USB 3.0 ports on the back.

    I put the fourth coat of polyurethane on the rolling platform. This is the final coat. I wish I had something else that needed a finish... I had to destroy the lid on the can of polyurethane to get it open because it was glued shut, but it's still at least 2/3 full. At any rate... the platform is nothing special but looks nicer than I expected and is definitely highly functional. I almost wish the slots would be visible, since they're the most interesting looking feature.

• printing
  I want to move my HP 4050TN printer out of my office and into the spare bedroom. It takes up too much space in my office, and I don't use it very often. I'd also like to set up my Canon color inkjet in the spare bedroom. Since that printer is USB only, I'd like to use an Apple Airport Express to extend my wireless network instead of running more cabling. At $99, it's easily worth it.

• July 20, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I ordered the 8507K61 edge trim from McMaster-Carr for my window cutout.

    I finished sanding the rolling platform and put the first coat of polyurethane on it.

    Just for kicks, I tried a system definition of MacPro 5,1 to see if it made any difference with my sleep/wake issues. I copied my original smbios.plist to ~/Hackintosh/smbios.plist.3,1 first. Good thing I did; the 5,1 smbios.plist caused a kernel panic. So instead I went back to 3,1 and no overclocking in my BIOS. For the moment, it seems to have resolved my sleep/wake issues. I doubt it will stay that way; I've done this before and eventually I had wake issues.

    I put a second coat of polyurethane on the rolling platform. Blondewood plywood and poplar absorb finishes like crazy, especially if they've been sitting in your home for years. it'll need a third coat and possibly a fourth.

• July 19, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I updated the BIOS from F10 to F12. No improvement in sleep/wake. I can sleep and wake once. On the second sleep, wake gives me a bit of snow on the first monitor and then a black screen.

    I assembled the wood part of a rolling platform using some scrap 3/4" thick blondewood plywood I had left over from making my bed years ago. I trimmed the edges with 1.5" x .75" poplar. Nothing special here, I tacked it together with my finish nailer and wood glue. I then plunge-cut 23 slots in it with my miter saw, spaced 1/2" apart, which is enough to allow some air to be pulled in from underneath the platform by the bottom intake fan and the power supply fan. OF course, the case has feet too, so it can draw air in even if I had not cut the slots. I rough sanded the top and sides, then installed the casters. I brought it into my office for a test fitment, it's near perfect. I'll finish sanding it tomorrow and start putting polyurethane on it. It'll be nice to have a reasonably good setup for cooling and maintenance.

• July 18, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    The two Xigmatek XLF-F1453 fans for the front intake arrived. I had to modify them slightly to fit... they had protruding rings around each screw hole on the intake side of the frame that prevented them from snapping into the front panel of the Fractal Design Arc Midi case. I ground them down with my Dremel and installed them. The machine remains quiet, it is essentially silent when under my desk. The fans in my SLA 1 amplifier are much louder.

    I'm still debating what to do about the filtering of the radiator fans. It's really just obstruction since I'm using them as exhaust. If I change them to intake, it really messes up the whole air flow in the case. For now I'm leaving it alone, since my CPU temperatures are fine. I think my only reasonable option is to cut out the filter above the radiators, but I'm reluctant to do it because the filter material isn't removable from it's frame.

    Yesterday I bought some cheap casters to make my rolling platform. I need to get moving on a design for it. The easy thing to do is use plywood I already have, but I'm leaning toward using perforated stainless steel.

    I still have not completely resolved my sleep/wake issues. They may never be resolved for this motherboard. Probably serves me right for choosing a Gigabyte board and GTX570 video card. On the upside, it's really not unreasonable for me to just shutdown and restart. That will be even more true when I install an SSD. Since I power down my monitors at night, I don't need to be concerned about the power consumption there. And of course I never put my old FreeBSD workstation to sleep because it didn't have sleep functionality (server type motherboard).

• July 17, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I received the 12"x24" sheet of 3/16" thick scratch-resistant polycarbonate (8707K122), black anodized binding posts (99024A312) and 13/64" drill bit from McMaster-Carr to make my side window. Unfortunately I can't find my edge trim, so I need to order some (McMaster-Carr 8507K61). However, I cut the window in the door and cut the polycarbonate to size, then drilled the holes for the binding posts and installed the window. I like it, it's much better than the hideous grill that was in the side door before and now I don't have a bunch of unfiltered air entering the case.

    I replaced the Corsair H100 fans with the Noctua NF-F12 PWM fans. My core temperatures look fine, and the machine is very quiet.

• July 14, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I ordered a pair of Noctua NF-F12 PWM fans and a pair of Xigmatek XLF-F1453 fans from Amazon.

    The Noctua NF-F12 PWM fans will replace the Corsair fans on the Corsair H100 radiator. The Noctua NF-F12 PWM fans are almost as effective as the Corsair fans, but much quieter and have a 150,000 hour MTBF.

    The Xigmatek XLF-F1453 fans will replace the Fractal Design front intake fans. I don't really trust the Fractal Design fans to last very long, and I'm certain that the Xigmatek are quiet since I already have some in the case.

• July 13, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    On Wednesday I received an optical cable to connected the S/PDIF audio output of my motherboard to my Behringer SRC2496. It worked fine until this morning. Sometime last night I had a power outage, and it caused my SRC2496 to stop working.

    After much fiddling and head-scratching, I went back to using the analog audio output of my motherboard. I eventually found a post in a forum on how to reset the SRC2496: hold the EMPHASIS and COPY buttons while powering up. I'll be darned, that appears to have fixed it. However, I don't trust it long-term. I believe it's over 10 years old, I think I bought it in 1998. The DAC in it is really nothing special, and I know the analog stages are low-grade. The main reason I bought it way back when was for digital conversion, and to avoid induced noise on the cable from my PC by moving the DAC close to my pre-amp and amplifier. At the time I was using an m-audio Revolution 7.1 card (which I wish I could still use, it was a nice card for the price). In my current home office, I don't really have noise sources to worry about, so I could just use the analog output of my hackintosh.

    On an entirely different subject... I am stunned at how well everything has been working on my hackintosh. Doing roughly the same things I was doing on my FreeBSD desktop, I see SpeedStep keeping my CPU cores at 1.6GHz most of the time. That's with iTunes playing music, my usual plethora of browser and terminal windows open, etc. I see a good amount of RAM free most of the time. And obviously since my CPUs are running at low speed most of the time, my core temperatures are very low. The GUI is very responsive and I'm running HyperDock with window previews enabled and it's smooth as butter. I really couldn't be happier for what I spent. And now that I have TimeMachine working to one of my FreeBSD servers, I don't have to feel like it's all a temporary experiment.

    I am intending to build a rolling platform to hold my tower. It will have some venting to allow free movement of air into the power supply and bottom intake fan. Right now I have the case propped off of the floor because its feet sink into the carpet, rendering those intake fans useless.

• July 10, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    With a slight overclock in my BIOS (42X CPU multiplier), my geekbench score is now 15,088. Nice that SpeedStep works!

• July 8, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I finished enough of the assembly to power up the system. I don't have a keyboard, mouse or display connected yet, but it powers up OK and all of the fans and the Corsair H100 are functioning. I believe I can attempt to boot it...

    I created the bootable OS X Lion USB stick using one of my old 8 gigabyte sticks. I need to pull one of my monitors from my current desktop, plug in a keyboard and see if the new system will actually boot.

    I bought a single-link DVI cable from BestBuy (otherwise known as your local rip-off store), and a Rocketfish USB to bluetooth adapter. Not sure the Rocketfish will work, but it's worth a try since it's the only thing I could find locally at 6:30PM on a Sunday. Time to hook things up and see where I get...

    Well, first hitch... UniBeast is not smart enough to emit an error when the target doesn't have a Master Boot Record. It reports success, but you have a USB stick that can't be booted. I repartitioned my 8G USB stick, and reran UniBeast. UniBeast took about half an hour; you can watch the progress by running df once in a while. I then ejected the USB stick from my MacBook Pro, and put it in one of the USB ports I have on the front of my case. Success! However, I had to fight a bit with keyboards and mice. I don't have a USB mouse that works with the bootloader, so I wound up using an old Unicomp USB keyboard with built-in pointing stick and mouse buttons.

    The first thing to do once it's possible: open Utilities->Disk Utility and format the new hard drive (use Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

    A long time later and some fumbling around, I have a basic setup working. One monitor (I haven't loaded the real 570 drivers yet, nor CUDA drivers). Sleep works, which is very nice. My Apple Magick Trackpad works with the Rocketfish USB Bluetooth adapter, though it takes a little bit to come to life after sleep. Dual monitors are working fine, and my Cinebench score shows 43 frames/sec for OpenGL.

    Next up is to see if I can get digital audio (I need to buy a new, long optical cable). For now, I moved the output of my digital equalizer to the output of my Rane BB 44X and plugged the analog output of my motherboard to the input of the Rane BB 44X and that works fine. I can button things up and put the Samsung 830 SSD on my list for a new install. Awesome!

    Next month I'll order a keyboard and the Samsung SSD. In the meantime I need to document all of my settings from Multibeast, including the latest SDST tweak that was needed to make my CPU cores run at the correct speed. My current geekbench score is 14,132.

• July 7, 2012
  
  • hackintosh1
    I bought many of the parts for my first hackintosh.

    I installed the Seasonic 660W power supply in the Fractal Design Arc Midi case. I also installed the Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 motherboard and the Xigmatek XLF-F1453 case fans, one in the bottom of the case and one replacing the original Fractal Design fan in the rear. The Fractal Design case fan that was in the rear was moved to the front of the case so that I have two intake fans in the front. I did this because I'm pretty sure I'll eventually be replacing the Fractal Design fans; from what I've read, they don't last a long time.

    I installed the i7 2700K CPU on the motherboard.

    I installed the Corsair fans on the Corsair H100 radiator. I suspect I will eventually replace these fans with something else, but it depends on how well they hold up. I know they're going to be loud. But in the end I'll probably replace the whole H100 setup anyway; I'd like a thicker radiator and I'm leery of leaks.

• April 28, 2012
  
  • ams
    I updated ams from FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE to FreeBSD 8.3-STABLE.

• April 26, 2012
  
  • www
    I completed www's upgrade from FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE to FreeBSD 8.3-STABLE.

    I installed gcc-4.6.4.20120420 from ports.

• April 25, 2012
  
  • www
    I started upgrading www from FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE to FreeBSD 8.3-STABLE.

• oldria
  I installed gcc-4.6.4.20120420 from ports.

• April 24, 2012
  
  • oldria
    I updated ria to FreeBSD 8.3-STABLE.

• March 25, 2012
  
  • ams
    For many reasons, I needed to rebuild and install ports/oss today. I had forgotten that it's critical to build from a root shell to avoid using the binutils linker that's in /usr/local. So, use su and not sudo.

• April 28, 2011
  
  • ams
    ams now has 6G of RAM. Of course, I can only use 4G of it since I have loadable kernel modules I can't stop using and hence I can't run a FreeBSD PAE kernel. I left all the RAM installed anyway since I don't have other machines that take 184-pin PC-2100 ECC memory.

• April 22, 2011
  
  • ams
    I ordered 4G of memory for ams from www.upgrade-solution.com. ams has been hurting for more RAM for quite some time, this purchase was overdue.

• April 19, 2011
  
  • oldria
    I updated ria to FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE.

• April 18, 2011
  
  • www
    I updated www to FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE.

• April 5, 2011
  
  • www
    I discovered an annoyance while working on my web site traffic tracker. With TSO enabled, tcpdump reports many 0-length packets. Ditto for anything using libpcap, which my collector program is using. It makes data collection worthless, so I disabled it on the ethernet interface (ifconfig em0 ... -tso).

• ams
  I updated ams from FreeBSD 8.2-PRERELEASE to FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE.

• February 28, 2011
  
  • www
    On my way home, I stopped at Microcenter and picked up a replacement SO-DIMM for the bad one I bought there on Saturday. I found a Crucial SO-DIMM replacement, which I installed when I got home. So far, so good. No read/write failure during POST, and the machine is running fine.

            last pid:  1473;  load averages:  0.00,  0.16,  0.15    up 0+00:07:59  20:58:05
            55 processes:  1 running, 53 sleeping, 1 stopped
            CPU 0:  0.4% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt, 99.6% idle
            CPU 1:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
            CPU 2:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
            CPU 3:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
            Mem: 69M Active, 31M Inact, 97M Wired, 252K Cache, 31M Buf, 3723M Free
            Swap: 4096M Total, 4096M Free
            

• February 27, 2011
  
  • www
    The SO-DIMM I bought from Microcenter is bad. It fails the BIOS' read/write test. I ordered a Corsair VS2GSDS667D2 from Newegg to replace it. I will try to exchange the bad one at Microcenter unless I can get a refund.

    I'm starting to dislike Microcenter. The failed SO-DIMM packaging appeared to have been opened before, presumably because they put returns right back on the shelf. The customer service in the store is horrible (very long waits, combative, waiting area is way too small). In addition, on weekends the parking lot is completely full with 10 to 15 cars circling around in search of a parking spot. I had to park illegally in the apartment complex next door. Waste my time, you lose me as a customer. Especially since your price on this SO-DIMM was $15 more than Newegg.

• February 26, 2011
  
  • www
    I picked up the second 2G SO-DIMM from Microcenter.

    I installed the second SO-DIMM and put www into the rack.

    I also made some tweaks to dwmsitemenu to make it consider web page files in the same directory as sibling candidates.

    I'm re-installing some ports, since wordpress caused an older version of mysql-server to be installed. I need to re-install gallery3 and wordpress after mysql-server-5.5.9 is installed, and also install mysql++-mysql55-3.0.8

• February 25, 2011
  
  • www
    I installed more ports:
    • GraphicsMagick-1.3.12
    • apache-2.2.17
    • gallery3-3.0.1
    • php-5.2.17
    • sqlite3-3.7.4
    • unzip-6.0
    • wordpress-3.0.5,1
    • xapian-core-1.0.22
    • zip-3.0
    
    In the queue or in process:

• February 24, 2011
  
  • www
    I started installing ports I know I need on all machines:
    • sudo
    • emacs-nox11
    • gcc-4.5

    Obviously all dependencies were also built and installed automatically.

• February 23, 2011
  
  • www
    Starting from a FreeBSD 8.2-BETA2 installation, I built a new kernel to add coretemp(4), and rebooted to make sure all was well.

    I then updated the ports tree and the FreeBSD source using csup. Then the usual:

    • make buildworld
    • make installkernel KERNCONF=www
    • reboot
    • mergemaster -p
    • make installworld
    • make delete-old
    • mergemaster
    • reboot
    • make delete-old-libs

• February 22, 2011
  
  • www
    The remaining parts for www arrived. However, I forgot to order the second 2G SO-DIMM. I'll need to order it, 2G total RAM isn't sufficient.

    In the meantime, I cut the hole for the Noctua NF-R8 80mm fan to cool the hard drives. I installed that fan, plus the second Noctua NF-R8. I replaced the original case fan with the Noctua NF-B9. I installed the Supermicro MBD-X7SPA-H-O motherboard with the first Patroit PSD22G6672S 2G SO-DIMM, and installed the Lite-On iHAS324-98B SATA DVD writer. I also installed the Western Digital WD1500HLFS 150GB VelociRaptor 10,000 rpm SATA hard drive, and the Western Digital WD1001FALS 1TB Caviar 7,200 rpm SATA hard drive.

    I powered the machine and started loading FreeBSD 8.2.

    One scare I had during installation: the header for the front panel IDC cable is not keyed. I assumed the wrong orientation, which put the motherboard in a state where it would not power up or send a power-up signal to the power supply after the front panel IDC cable was oriented correctly. the only solution I found to this problem was to use the "Force Power" juymper on the motherboard. This powered everything up fine, and it now powers up fine with the jumper removed.

• February 17, 2011
  
  • www
    The remaining parts for www are on their way from Newegg.

• February 16, 2011
  
  • oldria
    It's been over a month since I put ria into use, and so far it's been dandy. The Supermicro X7SPA-H-O is just about ideal for running a small headless FreeBSD machine like ria. Low power consumption and heat generation, dual gigabit ethernet, 6 SATA 3.0G/s ports, enough oomph to handle most server tasks.

    The good experience with ria is what led me to buy the same hardware for www (axle's replacement).

• February 15, 2011
  
  • www
    I picked up the CSE-731i-300B case for www from Microcenter for $87.99 plus tax. I also ordered the remaining initial parts for www from from Newegg.

• January 2, 2011
  
  • ams
    I managed to get X11 and enlightenment working, though it wasn't trivial. I am using the nvidia driver since my video card is a GeForce 6200 card.

• January 1, 2011
  
  • ams
    I've been working diligently on ams for a couple of days. I had to install a new video card, since the one from the old gwydion was bad. I installed a Swiftech MCP655 waterpump, replacing the old Swiftech MCP350 whose bearing shaft had failed (after 5 years).

    Software-wise, I updated to FreeBSD 8.2.

• December 29, 2010
  
  • oldria
    Noctua fans arrived, along with the Nanoxia PWMX. I won't be using the PWMX in ria, but I'm glad I have it. I found that the BIOS fan speed settings weren't appropriate for this machine, and changed them to run the fans at full speed all of the time.

    I cut the hole for the 80mm Noctua fan and installed it, and replaced the original 92mm case fan with the 92mm Noctua. The CPU temperature under full load (gmake -j6 on libDwm) on both cores crept up to 40C, which is OK. When going back to idle, core2 went to ambient and core1 was 5C over ambient. I'm not worried about the processor, and now I'm not worried about the hard drives. It's worth noting that this machine in its target use will use very little CPU.

    I then dropped ria in place, shut down the old gateway, and updated DNS. I tested things via my iPhone (using the new IP address), and all looks OK.

    I started level 0 backups from axle to ria's new hard drives. This gives me a backup in case something goes awry with reallocation of the old gateway as my new desktop.

• December 26, 2010
  
  • oldria
    I'm not thrilled with the airflow of the PWM fan included with the SuperMicro case. It's fine for the CPU, but it's not pulling much air past the hard drives; they're getting too warm. For now I've taped over the less useful intake areas of the front panel in order to force more air past the hard drives. The longer-term solution is to put an intake fan on the right side of the case, adjacent the hard drive cage. I need to cut the hole, of course.

    Before I start modding the case, I need to look at the BIOS settings for fan speeds. I have a bad feeling that the default setting has the fans running at 50% duty cycle.

    I updated the ports tree, only due to the fact that the gcc 4.6 port had a showstopper C++ bug with std::pair that was the result of work being done for C++0x compliance with constexpr. This was/is bug 46701.

    I'm now building gcc 4.6. Temperatures during stage3:

            % sysctl -a | grep temper
            dev.cpu.0.temperature: 37.0C
            dev.cpu.1.temperature: 37.0C
            dev.cpu.2.temperature: 34.0C
            dev.cpu.3.temperature: 34.0C
            

• December 24, 2010
  
  • oldria
    I ordered Noctua 92mm and 80mm fans, along with a Nanoxia PWMX PWM to voltage controller from frozencpu.com. The Noctua fans are rated for 150,000 hours which is well above any of the fans I have. They're not PWM, hence the PWMX (for the 92mm). The 80mm will be run directly from the power supply.

• December 23, 2010
  
  • oldria
    ria's case fans should've arrived, but did not.

    I think I've finished configuring pf for firewalling. This is a nice change from using ipfw and natd, though I continue to hate pf's configuration syntax.

    I also configured named, and now I'm acting as slave for the roots to reduce some of my outbound DNS traffic.

• December 22, 2010
  
  • oldria
    Most of the parts arrived to build ria. I'm still waiting for the case fans.

    I like the SuperMicro case for the price. The front is very well ventilated for airflow. There is a LOT of room when using a MiniITX board. The power supply kinda looks sub-par; one fan, no vents on the bottom, not much venting in the rear. However, given that this should be a fairly low power machine, it should be fine. The case is much larger than I need, but that's a non-issue. One drawback: the right side panel doesn't come off, or at least not easily (I haven't looked at removing it yet). That means my 5.25" to 3.5" hard drive bay adapter is probably useless since I can't screw it to the bay on the right side (only on the left). For now I've put all 4 drives in the drive cage. Realistically, I don't really need 5 hard drives; 3 of these are just going to be used for backups of other machines. I expect to need to replace the Seagate in the not-too-distant future, this drive has had negative reviews.

    I installed everything I have, and started the FreeBSD 8.2-BETA installation on the WD VelociRaptor drive. I created a 4G swap partition, though it probably should've been bigger. I only created a 2G /var, since I don't generally need crash dumps.

• December 21, 2010
  
  • oldria
    I downloaded FreeBSD 8.2-BETA images to my laptop.

• December 19, 2010
  
  • oldria
    I ordered the parts for ria from Newegg.