The Class E Network

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    I think this might have been a networking problem! The move to another switch and a good cable, and everything appears to be OK. That would explain the weird, extended, ping times and why there was nothing in the logs. A full SNAPRAID SYNC job went fine. (About 3 hours.)

    Well at least you found the problem...and I bet you were thinking "I'm going to have to replace this" :whistling: Regarding my old server yes it was reliable, the only problem I had was networking, but it turned out to be the cable.
    S'funny I think I remember somewhere in this thread about a 'wind tunnel' using cardboard and duck tape :D

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    Found the mesh I was looking for, that should be plenty for the door and the front of that bay, means I can get everything in one place. :thumbup:


    I never bothered shopping at Amazon before always found things elsewhere but at times I suppose it makes sense.

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    Well at least you found the problem...and I bet you were thinking "I'm going to have to replace this" :whistling:


    Regarding my old server yes it was reliable, the only problem I had was networking, but it turned out to be the cable.


    S'funny I think I remember somewhere in this thread about a 'wind tunnel' using cardboard and duck tape :D

    Part of the way of thinking in the old job was instant analysis. Identify the problem. Then, rather than get wrapped up in details, bypass, fix, or replace. Whatever was faster. When up and running again, then it was time to dig into the details and figure out what went wrong. (I have to fight that line of thinking these days.)


    While it will be days, at least, before I'm confident that this box is OK, this is an example of why it's necessary to keep an open mind. Without through testing, nothing can be completed ruled out.
    _________


    What can I say? I'm a cardboard engineer. On the cardboard duct, the only thing lacking was duct tape :) to seal edges to the front, and force the air flow through. Amazingly, the AC fan only made a difference of about 6 or 7 degrees C, under load. I think a smaller fan, right at the heat sinks, would do the about the same.
    _________


    On the mesh topic:
    You'll have to be OK with the stainless finish because, the grid is so fine, you couldn't paint it. (Stainless won't hold paint either.) -> This is what I was thinking about at Walmart. The grid is more coarse, which would make it less effective for dust, but it's already black and reasonably stiff. Tin snips to cut out a panel with tabs and done.


    Do you have Wal-Mart on your side of the pond?

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    Do you have Wal-Mart on your side of the pond?

    No but I wished we did, I remember the first time we went to the states and spent time with the wife's pen friend, one of the malls we went to had Wal-Mart, it was huge!! An Aladdins cave, you could get anything and everything, Wal-Mart bought the Asda supermarket chain and I've wondered if they will convert some of those to an American style Wal-Mart.


    The reason I'm looking toward that small a mesh again it's from the homeservershow site, some have used mesh in between the double skin door, acts as a dust trap without compromising air flow greatly.

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    The reason I'm looking toward that small a mesh again it's from the homeservershow site, some have used mesh in between the double skin door, acts as a dust trap without compromising air flow greatly.

    Hum,,, maybe I should build a server with cardboard and duct tape, and post it there! :D (homeservershow.com)

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    maybe I should build a server with cardboard and duct tape, and post it there!

    :) that reminds me of something from many years ago when I was using smoothwall, a site appeared and I'm sure it was called pizza box (I think) anyway what it was someone had taken an old pc and set it up in a pizza box...now I know today the terminology pizza box is used to define a case style for pc's or network switches. But back then it was done to take the old style 486 brick case and make something smaller.

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    Ordered all the bits Monday and according to the order it would arrive from Thurs onward,


    Icy Dock Bay Free Delivery arrived today via UPS
    eSata/Sate cable Free Delivery dispatched via Royal Mail but no post received today
    Mesh £4.50 P&P Delivery by Amazon (now with courier) expected delivery Thursday


    Makes no sense, the two free deliveries will arrive before the Amazon one, so I assume Amazon have that in stock.


    Bay is plastic, but I don't think I'll need any to add holes, 2.5 drives do not require screws either, they have a 'snap in' tab will post an image. The 3.5 bay has 2 'buttons' (their description) which lock into 2 of the drives fixing mounts, thereby reducing the number of screws.....but they do supply screws for the bay and the drives.

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    Bottom right hand corner there is like a plastic spring clip that holds the 2.5 drive in place, the 3.5 is held in with 2 centre screws, so the 2.5 is on top of the 3.5. I had to remove the screws that held in the DVD as these are the 'raised head' type, the bay than slides into the slots and is held in place by the N54L built in DVD clip.


    Had to change a bios setting, must have forgot when I first uploaded the 'hacked' bios, OMV recognises both drives, set up and formatted the 2.5, but the 3.5 is doing a secure wipe....can't remember where that came from, tried a couple of things using wipefs so I thought lets try secure wipe. The alternative was a live gparted CD or dban, anyway it's running so I'll just leave it.


    TBH, whilst this dock is plastic it does what it says on the 'tin' and they supply a number of screws. I'll monitor both drives temp over the next week, if I do start getting a heat problem I have a couple of spare case fans, my thought is to drill some holes in the case (colonial size :D ) butcher the fan with a usb cable (got loads of those) screw the fan to top of the case and plug into sub. Looking for functionality not aesthetics, sort of a frankenstein look =O Could get my son to graffiti the rest of the case 8o

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    tried a couple of things using wipefs

    Cancelled the secure scan....and did dome further searching, so by doing wipefs --all --force this has now cleared the drive. So I now have 2 drives formatted to btrfs, 1 for rsnapshot and the 2.5 for Docker images.
    Drives are currently at 35°C and 33°C so that's Ok :thumbup:

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    SS Mesh has finally arrived, ordered Monday delivered today Friday, only took Amazon 2 attempts!! Couldn't find the address..WTF we don't leave in the back of nowhere, result though they refunded the delivery cost.
    Mesh looks Ok, 1mm square holes so should be good, piece to be cut for the door and the second piece for the dock, looks like a job for Sunday....crap weather.

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    So you're not going to have to butcher your case... Darn it! (Just kidding.) Along a related line, I mentioned the possibility to the wife, about getting a 3D printer to toy around with this winter. It would be pretty cool to "make" a fan mount, complete with an integrated plastic duct! On thingiverse, they even have drive cages and all sorts of "stuff" for PC's. With a 3D printer, mod'ing possibilities are endless.
    ___________________


    The Good News:
    The EX-470 has been up for a week, with no issues. While it lacks ECC RAM, it will make for a good off-site backup at the new place.
    ___________________


    Bad News:


    Before you get too far into your N54L build, you might want to think about using something else other than BTRFS. Why?


    I've been running BTRFS on the R-PI's 4TB WD (Mypassport external), for a year or so. The first time BTRFS crapped out (wouldn't mount the drive), the message was:


    Error = parent transid verify failed" on 14265458688 wanted 464230 found 464221


    I tried to correct the above with the following:


    btrfs-zero-log /dev/sda1

    This didn't clear the issue so I used the following:

    umount /dev/sda1
    btrfs check --repair


    then to clear the following:
    "free space inode generation (0) did not match free space cache generation (12376) mismatched cache error"

    I used;
    mount -a clear_cache


    After the last, the drive mounted.
    ( I found a few more tricks/fixes to get a drive to mount, but the decisions required seem to be too damned arbitrary and the consequence for a wrong choice is the loss of all data.)
    ________________________________________________________________


    It happened again, over at the new place. This time, I couldn't get the drive to re-mount. To guess at what happened, since BTRFS appears to be logging transactions, I believe a power hit or two caused logging mismatches.
    This is aggravating because I was looking for a data drive file system that's forgiving of this exact kind of event. (And to add a bit of extra detail - there were no read or writes to the drive, in progress, when it crapped out.)
    As it seems, "Copy on Write" doesn't mean much if transaction log mismatches are enough to kill the file system. Thinking about it, rather than knocking the file system off-line, one would think that the developers would make the file system mount, at least, "Read Only" until the user/admin could sort it out one way or the other.


    The R-PI's 4TB drive is going back to EXT4. BTRFS is way too fragile to be used without an UPS and it's utilities have a long way to go before they could be considered "mature". What a PITA.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Before you get too far into your N54L build, you might want to think about using something else other than BTRFS. Why?

    Pants!! But thanks for heads up, I just thought that might be a better option with your reference V5 awhile back, I'll just stick with EXT4 then.


    Glad the EX-470 is still up and running, who says you can't use old kit for a specific purpose ^^


    I mentioned the possibility to the wife, about getting a 3D printer to toy around with this winter.

    Yes, but did she agree, mine would say "What do you need that for" to which my reply would be to extol the endless possibilities of 3D printing stuff for school use.....not mentioning that it could be used for more practical applications :D:D

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    Yes, but did she agree, mine would say "What do you need that for" to which my reply would be to extol the endless possibilities of 3D printing stuff for school use.....not mentioning that it could be used for more practical applications :D:D

    I already have "wife buy in". When she found out that I could make her all sorts of knitting paraphernalia, organization do-dad's, and similar items, she was sold. I'm giving thought to this one. Thankfully, the desktop foot print is not huge. On the other hand it has a decent sized print volume and, more importantly, the price is reasonable. It's a starter item.

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    I already have "wife buy in". When she found out that I could make her all sorts of knitting paraphernalia, organization do-dad's, and similar items, she was sold.

    :D:D:D:D:D You have to do the same as me then, that printer in the UK is £362, TBH I've never researched them, but I have seen so much that can be created with one of these.


    Well if you get get one obviously a full review would be in order :)

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    Pants!! But thanks for heads up, I just thought that might be a better option with your reference V5 awhile back, I'll just stick with EXT4 then.

    I went into it (BTRFS) with an open mind.


    When a bit of file corruption was detected during a scrub, way back, I thought OK! Now, I'll find which files are corrupted, those that didn't match their check sums, and replace them from the source. That would have been as simple as deleting them locally, where the next Rsync job would replace the missing files with clean versions from a ZFS mirror. That was the thought anyway.


    I found, in reality, that it's impossible to find the actual names of the files that were supposedly corrupt. (If there's a way, I don't know what it is and, at the time, no else appeared to know either.) I jiggered it around until it was "healthy" (as reported) but, really, I think all I actually did was reset the checksums on corrupt files. I never found, exactly, what was actually corrupt. As I said before, BTRFS has a LONG way to go before it's really for prime time.


    Amazingly, some distro's (to include OMV) are planning to standardize on BTRFS in the next few years. Until BTRFS Dev's get the underpinnings of BTRFS sorted out, like usable utilities with a logical process for troubleshooting common problems (like how to prevent the loss of the entire file system from a power outage), wide spread use is way too premature.

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    I went into it (BTRFS) with an open mind.

    I just thought that this would be the next step, but I suppose the tried and tested 'it does what it says on the tin' is the one to stick with.
    Rockstor use BTRFS they used it from the get go, it's still alive but their latest blog posts are Nov 17

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    Rockstor use BTRFS they used it from the get go, it's still alive but their latest blog posts are Nov 17

    And just like mdadm RAID, BTRFS may work well, as long as it's on an UPS (where it won't lose sync of it's transactions).


    Having to have transaction ID's clean as whistle, defeats the entire concept of "Copy on Write" where a file change is copied complete to the hard drive before the older version is deleted. Given this behavior, even is there's a power outage, either the changed file is fully committed to the disk, or the original is untouched, thereby guaranteeing at least one uncorrupted copy of the file in question.


    This was the behavior I was looking for, in adopting BTRFS. "CoW" should make the file system resistance to power outages but, as it seems, Windows/NTFS does better with sudden power outages. It's strange, even odd, that a file system maintenance process can result in the entire file system going off line in a way that can't be retrieved.


    This brings back memories of tech projects, back in the day, and "requirements creep". If a project manager is not on the ball, a project can "evolve" into something that doesn't even satisfy the original requirement.

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    It's time for a little "off topic" show and tell. :)


    This is what I meant about trim carpentry:


    All windows are new, maintenance free vinyl, intended for new construction. Here's an unfinished window, sitting in a rough opening.




    This is a "finished" window. The arrow points to the top stop strip, that's store bought. The rest I cut from dimensional lumber that wasn't intended for trim use. While it's time intensive, it saved a lot of money when compared to buying clean finished trim lumber. It's nothing fancy but, when trim work is involved, cuts have to be clean and tight measurements are required.



    This picture is dark, but I wanted the cabin to show up in the background. This is where I'd put you up, during a visit. Have you seen this movie ? -> Cabin in the Woods. It's a bit smaller, but just like that! (Just kidding. :) )
    While you can't see it, just on the other side of the cabin is a gurgling stream. The cabin, and the areas surrounding, are shaded from the sun during the heat of the day. It's a really nice setting, peaceful and restful. I'm actually looking forward to renovating it.
    ___________________________________



    Here's the flooring I mentioned earlier, as it's going in. It's a decent looking fake that's fairly easy to install. For reasons that don't make sense to me, pro-installers complained (in reviews) about it being to hard to install. I don't understand that, or exactly what it is that they would want..?? Sure, minding the details is important, but installing this is much easier than real hard wood and it's reasonably forgiving of minor sub-floor variations. These days, it seems that builders want to "blink" install things, while still handing a homeowner an outlandish bill for the job.




    And so it goes. While there's plenty still left to do, it's getting there. Setting the decks aside (that's next year) the bulk of the work should be done in the next few weeks.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Looking good, you deserve the 3D printer for all your hard work :D


    See the finished window for you is capable of having moulding because most US homes use SIP construction, that is obvious from your first picture without the moulding. In the UK homes are constructed using cavity wall, this is the standard method of house construction, they can use SIP's but in the UK they'll call this 'modular'.



    So the cavity wall is much wider, in fact our house from the external to the internal window opening is approx. 13" (you noticed I slipped in inches and not mm :) ) so internal moulding is not really possible as per the picture of my office window.



    That's why I like US home's, or at least the construction, the windows 'sit' inside the SIP allowing a moulding to be added, the external then has a vapour barrier added before the final finish, be it cladding, brick etc.


    The UK has always used cavity wall construction since the 1920 house boom it was introduced initially as damp prevention. A skilled bricklayer can lay up to 500-1000 bricks a day but that depends on the type of construction.


    Your flooring's looking good :thumbup: is the boss pleased :)
    _______________________________________________________________________


    I took a delivery for the couple over the road yesterday, came on a pallet so had to put it in the garage. Anyway wondered why he hadn't come over so I went to him, talking on the doorstep (as you do) he's taking next week off work to re do their en-suite, at which point the conversation went to 'we' as his wife appeared (in the UK we means the Royal we i.e. together). Well the look on Jo's face was a classic....she then chipped in with "Team ******" (****** that's their surname) will be busy next week re decorating the en-suite. By which time I'm cracked up...they have 4 children and next week is school half term so the kids will be at home :D:D

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    I seem to be getting my fair share of W10 machines to sort out recently, usually because of cumulative updates not installing correctly. I have a USB 2.0 to SATA bridge thingy, got it's own power supply and appropriate SATA cables, but I was wondering about getting one of those USB 3.0 to SATA connectors something like this one have you ever used anything like that?


    I know from here on the forum there are certain ones to stay clear of because of the chipset.

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