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Raspberry Pi PoE+ is a typo (should be PoS)

Seriously. ‘S’ is adjacent ‘E’ on a QWERTY keyboard.

I knew the official PoE+ HATs were pieces of poop before I bought them. This isn’t news. You don’t have to look hard to find Jeff Geerling’s comments, Martin Rowan’s comments or the many others who’ve complained. I had read them literally years before I purchased.

I decided to buy 4 of them despite the problems, for a specific purpose (4 rack mounted Pi4B 8G, all powered via PoE alone). I’ve had those running for a few days and they’re working. They’re inefficient, but so far they work.

I also ordered 2 more, with the intent of using one of them on a Raspberry Pi 4B 8G in an Anidees Pro case and keeping the other as a spare. Well, in literally 36 hours, one of them is already dead. I believe it destroyed itself via heat. And therein lies part of the problem. I’ll explain what I casually observed, since I wasn’t taking measurements.

I ran the Pi from USB-C for about a day, without the PoE HAT installed. It was in the Anidees Pro case, fully assembled. It was fine, idling around 37.4C and not seeming to go above 44C when running high loads (make -j4 on some medium-sized C++ projects; a prominent workload for me). Solid proof that for my use, the Anidees Pro case works exactly as intended. The case is a big heatsink. Note that I have the 5mm spacers installed for the lid, so it’s open around the entire top perimeter.

I then installed the PoE+ HAT, with extension headers and the correct length standoffs that are needed in the Anidees Pro case. Note that this activity isn’t trivial; the standoffs occupy the same screw holes as the bottom of the case (from opposite directions), and an unmodified standoff is likely to bottom out as it collides with the end of the case bottom screw. You can shorten the threaded end of the standoff, or do as I did and use shorter standoffs and add a nut and washers to take up some of the thread. I don’t advise shortening the screws for the bottom of the case.

I plugged in the PoE ethernet from my office lab 8-port PoE switch, which has been powering the 4 racked Pis for a few days. And observed the expected horrible noise noted by others. Since I expected it, I immediately unplugged the USB-C power. I continued installing software and started compiling and installing my own software (libDwm, libCredence, mcweather, DwmDns, libDwmWebUtils, mcloc, mcrover, etc.). It was late, so I stopped here. On my way out of the home office, I put my hand on the Pi. It was much warmer than when running from the USB-C. In fact, uncomfortably warm. I checked the CPU temperature with vcgencmd, it was under 40C. Hmm. I was tired, so I decided to leave it until the next day and see what happens.

In the morning the Pi had no power. I unplugged and plugged both ends of the 12″ PoE cable. Nothing.

It turns out that the PoE+ HAT is dead. Less than 48 hours of runtime. As near as I can tell, it cooked itself. The PoE port on the ethernet switch still works great. The Pi still works great (powered from USB-C after the dead PoE+ HAT was removed).

I find this saddening and unacceptable. “If it’s not tested, it’s broken.”. Hey Eben: it’s broken. No, literally, it’s broken. And looks to not even be smoke tested. In fact I’d say it’s worse than the issues with Rev. 1 of the original PoE HAT. This is a design problem, not a testing problem. In other words, the problem occurred at the very beginning of the process. Which means it passed through all of engineering. And this issue lies with leadership, not the engineers.

So not only have you gone backward, you’ve gone further back than you were for Rev. 1 of the PoE HAT. And you discontinued the only good PoE HAT you had? Now I’n just left with, “Don’t believe anything, ANYTHING from the mouth of Eben Upton.”.

I’m angry because my trust of Raspberry Pi has been eroding for years, and this is just another lump of coal. We hobbyists were basically screwed for 3 years on availability of all things Pi 4, and you’re still selling a PoE HAT that no one should use.

I’ve been saying this for a couple of years now: there is opportunity for disruption here. While I appreciate the things the Raspberry Pi Foundation has done, I’m starting to feel like I can’t tell anyone that the Pi hardware landscape is great. In fact for many things, it has stagnated.

For anyone for whom 20 US dollars matters, do NOT buy an official PoE+ HAT. Not that it matters… it’s June 2023 and it’s still not trivial to find something to use it (a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4).

There comes a time when a platform dies. They get lazy after the ecosystem builds around them. I’m wondering if I am seeing that on the horizon for the Raspberry Pi.

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More Raspberry Pi? Thanks!

Years ago I bought a fairly simple 1U rack mount for four Raspberry Pi Model 4B computers. Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and for years it wasn’t possible to find Model 4B’s with 4G or 8G of RAM at less than scandalous scalper prices. So the inexpensive rack mount sat for years collecting dust.

This month, June 2023, I was finally able to buy four Model 4B Raspberry Pis with 8G of RAM, at retail price ($75 each). Hallelujah.

I also bought four of the PoE+ HATs. Which IMHO suck compared to the v2 version of the original PoE HATs; the efficiency is terrible at the tiny loads I have on them (no peripherals), they consume a lot more power and waste it as heat. I don’t need to repeat what’s been written elsewhere by those who’ve published measurements. There also appears to be a PoE to USB-C isolation issue, but fortunately for me I won’t have anything plugged into the USB-C on these Pis.

The plan is to put these four Pis in the wall-mounted switch rack in the basement. They’re mostly going to provide physical redundancy for services I run that don’t require much CPU or network and storage bandwidth. DNS, DHCP, mcrover and mcweather, for example.

I am using Samsung Pro Endurance 128G microSD cards for longevity. If I needed more and faster I/O, I’d be using a rack with space for M.2 SATA per Pi, but I don’t need it for these.

I’ve loaded the latest Raspberry Pi OS Lite 64-bit on them, configured DHCP and DNS for them (later I’ll configure static IPs on them), and started installing the things I know I want/need. They all have their PoE+ HATs on, and are installed in the rack mount. I’ll put the mount into the rack this weekend. The Pis are named grover, nomnom, snoopy and lassie.

Separately, I ordered 2 more Raspberry Pis (same model 4B with 8G of RAM), two more PoE+ HATs and 2 cases: an Argon ONE v2 and an Anidees AI-PI4-SG-PRO. Both of these turn a significant part of the case into a heatsink.

The Argon ONE v2 comes with a fan and can’t use the PoE+ HAT, but can accept an M2 SATA add-on. I’m planning to play with using this one in the master bedroom, connected to the TV. It’s nice that it routes everything to the rear of the case; it’s much easier to use in an entertainment center context.

I believe the Anidees AI-PI4-SG-PRO will allow me to use a PoE+ HAT, but I’ll need extension headers which I’ll order soon. I’ve liked my other Anidees cases, and I think this latest one should be the best I’ve had from them. They’re pricey but premium.

It’s nice that I can finally do some of the work I planned years ago. Despite hoping that I’d see RISC-V equivalents by now, the reality is that the Pi has a much larger ecosystem than anything equivalent. It’s still the go-to for several things and I’m happy.

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Jan 14, 2023 Unacknowledged SYNs by country

It’s sometimes interesting to look at how different a single day might be versus the longer-term trends. And to see what happens when you make changes to your pf rules.

I added all RU networks I was blocking from ssh to the list blocked for everything. I also fired up a torrent client on my desktop.

RU moving up the list versus the previous 5 days is no surprise; a good portion of traffic I receive from RU is port scanning. But I’ll have to look to see what caused the CZ numbers to climb.

I think the only interesting thing about the torrent client is that I should do something to track UDP in a similar manner as I track TCP. If I have a torrent client running, I will wind up with a lot of UDP traffic (much of it directed to port 6881 on this day), and will respond with ICMP port unreachable. To some extent this is a burden on my outbound bandwidth, but on the other hand it will allow me to add an easy new tracker to mcflowd: “to whom am I sending ICMP port unreachables?”. Of course, UDP is trivially spoofed, so I don’t truly know the source of the UDP.

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Sports thoughts of the day

Jan 5, 2023

Texas fired Chris Beard after a felony domestic violence charge. Maybe Texas Tech and Texas can now agree that Chris Beard might be a scumbag. And probably hangs out with scumbags.

Here’s the sign I want to see at games from both schools: “Chris Beard bites!!!”. See the police report. Yikes.

There are scumbags in all walks of life. But I’d like to see us be less forgiving of scumbags on big stages with positions of leader/teacher/mentor. And any men who bite their domestic partner in anger. That’s just crazy, right? As my friend Andy put it, “Biting Hall of Fame: Marv Albert, Mike Tyson, Hannibal Lecter.” All bat-poop-crazy in their own way.

Kudos to Texas for doing the right thing here. Boos for taking 3 weeks to do it.

I’d like the coach of my alum to be fired (Juwan Howard) for his inability to maintain a professional demeanor. He hasn’t advanced to scumbag status though, at least not yet. There’s the rub: yet. I don’t hate Howard, I just don’t trust him. Ticking time bomb. I miss John Beilein, a lot.

I put Harbaugh in the untrustworthy bucket too. He’s been there a long time, bu† the hypocritical righteousness while violating NCAA rules is the one that really rubs me the wrong way. Not to mention the stupidity. If you bought a hamburger for a recruit at the Brown Jug, it’s downright stupid to lie about it to an investigation committee. We’re not talking about fancy food here; Wendy’s makes better burgers. In fact, at my age, you’d have to pay me to eat a burger at the Brown Jug. It’s a college campus dive. I spent my fair share of time at the Brown Jug as a student, mostly eating eggs and pancakes late at night after a long study session with friends. But it’s not a place you take someone to impress them or sway them. It’s not even the institution that Crazy Jim’s or the Fleetwood is, never mind a fantastic food place like Zingerman’s.

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Mac Studio M1 Ultra: The Decision

I’ve needed a macOS desktop for many years. My hackintosh, built when Apple had no current hardware to do what I needed to do, is more than 10 years of age. It’s my primary desktop. It’s behind on OS updates (WAY behind). It’s old. To be honest, I’m quite surprised it still runs at all. Especially the AIO CPU cooler.

The urgency was amplified when Apple silicon for macOS hit the streets. Apple is in transition, and at some point in the future, there will be no support for macOS on Intel. They’ve replaced Intel in the laptops, there’s an M1 iMac and an M1 mini, and now the Mac Studio. We’ve yet to see an Apple silicon Mac Pro, and while I’m sure it’s coming, I can’t say when nor anything about the pricing. If I assume roughly 2X multicore performance versus the M1 Ultra SOC, plus reasonable PCIe expansion, it’ll likely be out of my price range.

Fortunately, for today and the foreseeable future, the Mac Studio fits my needs. In terms of time == money, my main use is compiling C++ and C code. While single-core performance helps, so does multi-core for any build that has many units that can be compiled in parallel. So, for example, the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra has 20 CPU cores. Meaning my builds can compile 20 compilation units in parallel. Obviously there are points in my builds where I need to invoke the archiver or the linker on the result of many compiles. Meaning that for parts of the build, we’ll be single-core for a short period unless the tool itself (archiver, linker, etc.) uses multiple threads.

It’s important to note that a modern C++ compiler is, in general, a memory hog. It’s pretty common for me to see clang using 1G of RAM (resident!). Run 20 instances, that’s 20G of RAM. In other words, the 20 cores need at least 1G each to run without swapping. Add on all the apps I normally have running, and 32G is not enough RAM for me to make really effective use of the 20 cores, day in and day out.

So 64G would my target. And given that the CPU and GPU share that memory, that’s a good target for me. However…

Availability of Mac Studios with the exact configuration I wanted has been abysmal since… well… introduction. I wanted M1 Ultra with 64-core GPU, 64G RAM, 2TB storage. Apple’s lead time for this or anything close: 12 weeks. I’m assuming that a lot of this is the ongoing supply chain issues, COVID and possibly yield issues for the M1 Ultra. Apple is missing out on revenue here, so it’s not some sort of intentional move on their part, as near as I can tell. While I think there are M2 Pro and M2 Max on the horizon for the MacBook Pro (I dunno, 1H2023?), I think it’ll be a year before I see something clearly better for my use than the M1 Ultra. I can’t wait a year, unfortunately. I also can’t wait 3 months.

In fact, since I’m closing in on finishing the den, and need to move my office there, this is now urgent just from a space and aesthetics perspective. I intentionally designed the desk overbridges in the den to comfortably accommodate a Mac Studio (or Mac Mini) underneath either side. I DON’T want my hackintosh in this room! I want quiet, aesthetically pleasing, small, inconspicuous, efficient, and not a major source of heat. I need 10G ethernet. Fortunately, the Mac Studio ticks all of the boxes.

Today I picked up what was available, not exactly what I wanted. It’s an open box and hence $500 off: a Mac Studio with M1 Ultra, 64-core GPU, 128G of RAM and 1TB storage. The only thing from my wishlist not met here: 2TB storage. However, I’m only using 45% of the space on my 1TB drive in my hackintosh, and I haven’t tried to clean up much. I don’t keep music and movies on my desktop machine, but if I wanted to with the Mac Studio, I could plug in Thunderbolt 4 storage.

I’m much more excited about moving into the den than I am about the new computer. That’s unlikely to change, since the den remodeling is the culmination of a lot of work. And I know that I’m going to have to fiddle to make the new Mac Studio work well with my Dell U3818DW display. Assuming that goes well, I’m sure I’ll have a positive reaction to the Mac Studio. The Geekbench single-core scores are double that of my hackintosh. The multi-core scores are 7 times higher. This just gives me confidence that I’ll notice the speed when using it for my work. Especially since the storage is roughly a decimal order of magnitude faster. The 2TB is faster, but the jump will be huge from SATA to NVMe for my desktop. I notice this in my Threadripper machine and I’ll notice it here.

My main concern long-term is the cooling system. Being a custom solution from Apple, I don’t have options when the blower fans fail. Hopefully Apple will extend repairability beyond my first 3 years of AppleCare+. I like keeping my main desktop for more than 3 years. While in some ways it’s the easiest one to replace since it’s not rackmounted and isn’t critical to other infrastructure, it’s also my primary interface to all of my other machines: the Threadripper workstation for Linux and Windows development, my network storage machine, my web server, my gateway, and of course the web, Messages, email, Teams, Discord, etc. It saves me time and money if it lasts awhile.

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mcweather first pass completed

I’ve completed my first pass at ‘mcweather’, a caching weather server and command line client.

The main thrust here was to decouple weather condition and forecast fetching from qmcrover (a GUI client that is part of mcrover). I wanted a single server at home to fetch the weather information and provide it to local clients (command line and qmcrover). This avoids unnecessary traffic to the NWS (National Weather Service) web sites from local clients. This makes it faster as a consequence, since the local clients get the information from the local server.

It is secured using libDwmCredence. I changed qmcrover to use it, and in the process I updated two of my Raspberry Pis from buster to bullseye. One hurdle I encountered here: I was previously using a hand-built version of Qt 5.12. I didn’t want to continue doing so with bullseye, because Qt is very big and takes a long time to build. But the Raspberry Pi repositories don’t have two of the Qt libraries I need: libqt5webengine5 and libqt5webenginewidgets5. I hence added the debian repository to my list of apt repositories by adding it to /etc/apt/source.list:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main contrib non-free

I also created /etc/apt/preferences:

Package: *
Pin: origin raspbian.raspberrypi.org
Pin-Priority: 800

Package: *
Pin: origin deb.debian.org
Pin-Priority: 600

So far, so good. I’m running the server (mcweatherd) on the Raspberry Pi 4 that runs qmcrover in full screen mode in my office.

dwm@pi4e:/home/dwm% psg mcweatherd

USER   PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root  8877  0.0  0.2 32832 8680 ?   Sl   01:10 0:02 /usr/local/sbin/mcweatherd

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2021 end of year ramblings

Another year of COVID-19 pandemic. Tragic, yes. Much of it preventable, yes (get vaccinated, please). But as the year closes, now is as good a time as any to reflect…

I was recently reminded of the “Why am I here?” question. It’s not as if it isn’t always staring us in the face. It is in fact central to being an adult human being. Mortality is real. But some have seen a lot of mortality this year.

Before I go to my main topic, I just want to say that my heart goes out to those who’ve endured day after day of preventable tragedies in 2021. Health care workers in particular. To those who’ve been pushed to questioning their hippocratic oath and other ethics: thank you, and stand strong. You are not alone; far from it. I’ll give you my hand if you’ll take it.

“Why am I here?”

For me, the simple answer: to build things. The complete answer is much more complex, but…

One day the remnants of humanity on this planet will just be a layer of remains. It’ll likely be a thin layer; we haven’t been here very long and I suspect our presence here will be shorter than the dinosaurs. However, we’ll leave behind an interesting layer.

Some of it utterly confounding in the grand scheme of things. Ungodly amounts of empty plastic containers. Megatons of polymer cases with silicon, glass, rare earth metals, etc. inside. Paper and more paper. An odd carbon transfer.

Some of it fascinating. Music in some form. Mathematics. Literature. Law. Medicine. Computing. Science in general. AI.

Some of it sad. Greed. Avarice. War. Poverty. Starvation. Exploitation. We’ve a long list of evils.

What do you want to leave behind? There’s a saying among software craftspeople, “Leave the code better than you found it.”. It’s attributed to Bob Martin. I’ve read a lot of Bob’s work, and listened to most of his publicly available talks. I’d be stunned if he claimed to have invented this idea. This idea predates software by… I don’t know, several millennia? It’s as old as the craftsperson, and is not specific to software. But it’s definitely a really good thing to do in software. Just as it is in plumbing, carpentry, medicine, law, etc.

I want to leave behind good, useful things that wouldn’t have existed without me. It’s weird. It feels humble and prideful at the same time.

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Making my own office furniture: Part 5

The under-desk rack cabinet is done except for the porcelain top insert. I haven’t yet decided which marble-look porcelain I want to use here. For the foreseeable future, this top won’t even be visible, which argues for low cost. On the other side is my penchant for “do things once, do them right” and “cry once now, or cry a lot later”. Thus far I’ve kept to “if you can make a decision late, do so”.

I’ve assembled the base of the first desk. My friend Randy Forbes noted that the feet of the legs are overkill. He then said, “I miss you.”. Having friends that appreciate who you are (and knowing that you’re gonna be that person even if it’s quirky/annoying/spooky) is SUCH a wonderful thing!

Now that I have the base of the first desk assembled and what I know is a solid desk design (with overkill thrown in), I thought I’d reflect a moment. This is after all a design/engineering/craftsmanship/whatever web site.

I’m not a fine woodworker. It’s not that I don’t have the patience (I do); I don’t have the time. Maybe someday.

My woodworking creations lean heavily toward utilitarian. I tend to choose function over form. My desk design reflects it. It’s sort of mission/craftsman style, but I have a LOT of fasteners that are NOT in those styles and none that typically are. I’ve got dowels, pocket hole screws, threaded inserts, long bolts going into dowel nuts, guide pins and leaded bronze guide bushings. No mortises or tenons, no biscuits, no dominos. The only time I’ve used my chisels thus far is to scrape off half-dried glue. Nevermind the 1″ thick Delrin feet or the single piece of porcelain for most of the top. I’m gonna call it “my style”. Which is again, utilitarian. It’s VERY strong; the base will likely easily hold 1,000 pounds. It has gaps for cabling. It’s designed to be able to be disassembled into 4 parts, since it’ll be heavy in total. The thick Derlin feet will allow me to slide it easily on the porcelain floor, and they can be replaced since they’re bolted to threaded inserts in the legs. Maybe someone will be using these desks long after I’m gone.

In terms of artistry, it’s not that far from a some-assembly-required MDF desk. Just with much nicer materials and beefier fastening. On the other hand, it has some qualities of a commissioned work: it’s designed specifically for the space it will inhabit and the people who will be using it. It’s actually designed by its primary user. In software and other technology fields, we call this dogfooding. I’ll be using what I’ve created.

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Facebook… go away

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a disingenuous paragraph in a full-page newspaper ad as this one from Facebook in their ongoing attack on Apple:

Apple’s change will limit their ability to run personalized ads. To make ends meet, many will have to start charging you subscription fees or adding more in-app purchases, making the internet much more expensive and reducing high-quality free content.

Let’s be clear here. For one… there is literally NO free content on Facebook. And very little of it is high-quality. That which is, does not come from Facebook. They are not a company of journalists and writers.

Newsflash for those who’ve been under a rock for the last 25 years… the Internet has always been expensive. The real issues here:

1) who’s profiting?

2) in what currency?

3) is the transaction clear and transparent?

There are many companies profiting from the existing model of ‘free’ Internet. But it’s not small businesses. It’s Google, Facebook and a trove of others (Apple included).

On the currency and transparency… Facebook is far and away the worst here. They despise transparency. Apple wants to expose their users to what Facebook is collecting from you, the product, and let you choose whether or not you’d like to participate. You can choose to opt in. Facebook is worried that many will opt out once they understand what Facebook is doing. Not an unjust fear, but it’s yet to be seen how it will play out.

Apple’s motivation is coming from its customers. They (and I’m one of them) want these options. They’re one of the reasons we choose to buy iOS devices instead of Android devices. I don’t want targeted advertising. In fact, at this point I’ve been using the Internet for 30 years and I’m essentially blind to all online advertising; my brain has a highly-trained ad-ignoring filter. I don’t want large corporations tracking my every move online. Especially without transparency. Heaven forbid that I be willing to pay Apple for a device that allows me to protect some of my privacy!

Facebook’s motivations are at least partly coming from their customers too. But you, the end user, are NOT their customer. The advertisers are their customers. You are their product. I don’t quite get why Facebook tries to deny this; without you (the end user) and all the data they collect on you… they have no product to sell to advertisers. They’d have to change their business model. Perhaps charge a subscription fee. And for most of us… Facebook is definitely not something we’d knowingly pay ‘real’ money to use. But if you’re a Facebook user, you ARE paying for it. With your privacy and your time. And possibly your mental health. And maybe even your data plan.

And Facebook knows this to be true.

Beyond hurting apps and websites, many in the small business community say this change will be devastating for them too, at a time when they face enormous challenges. They need to be able to effectively reach the people most interested in their products and services to grow.

LMAO. “Hurting apps and websites”. Could you be more ambiguous? Oh, I see… you mean facebook.com. Sorry, I forgot for a moment that Google and Facebook have _decimated_ many small businesses as well as some large ones (news broadcasters, journalists, ad agencies, large newspapers, local sign makers…).

Again… you, the end user, are not the customer. The advertisers are the customers.

Forty-four percent of small to medium businesses started or increased their usage of personalized ads on social media during the pandemic, according to a new Deloitte study. Without personalized ads, Facebook data shows that the average small business advertiser stands to see a cut of over 60% in their sales for every dollar they spend.

In other words… once users understand what Facebook is doing, most will opt out?

Update May 12, 2021: it looks like the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. In the first week of 14.5 rollout, 96% of users are choosing to opt out. Should I feign surprise?