Nothing Much To Report
Drumpf doesn’t know anything about foreign affairs which is not surprising since he has pretty much made himself persona non grata in Scotland, and has offended the more than one billion inhabitants of the planet who are Muslim.
Apparently because misery loves company, Ted Cruz has selected Carly Fiorina as his running mate.
Target is being boycotted because it has said it won’t require shoppers to display their genitals before selecting a bathroom, or something similar. Since this is the work of the “American Family Association” I know that based on past incidents the number of supporters is wildly over-stated, and they will generate astroturf campaigns and ask for money. I’m wondering how any non-governmental organization can legally enforce bathroom sex checks because effective checks would get you listed as a sex offender in every state or sued for sexual harassment.
54 comments
LOL Fiorina! 😀 Ahhh… I know what she is capable of! Having been a project manager at HP during her worst years! Thankfully, she was actually *too* stupid & ignorant to do too much damage (she didn’t have a clue what half of HP actually did!) HP was resilient enough to survive. 🙂 The USA isn’t.
Good luck with them. 😀
Carly is an example of the fallacy that all you need to be a CEO is an MBA – that’s pure bullshit. If you don’t know what the corporation does, you can’t know if it is doing it right or how to make it do it better. You can’t take the CEO from Pepsi and put him at the helm of Apple and expect good numbers. Ain’t gonna happen…
And the Republican circus goes on…
As a fun aside, Boehner calling Cruz “Lucifer in the Flesh” and “the most miserable son of a b*tch I’ve ever worked with” gave me the best laugh of the day.
I can’t wait for the convention. God only knows what will happen then. I’m serving popcorn because it’s going to be the best entertainment we’ve had in a long time.
It may be as bad as the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, or the Daly police riot of 1968 as some people called it. There is a lot of anger out there and both Drumpf and Cruz have plugged into it and made it worse. Kasich only seems better because he isn’t as vocal with the hate.
At this point it is hard to say whether the delegate count or the body count will be larger. 🙁
Sounds like fun for all. 😉 And we have our own fun now also. Woo, hoo.
Apparently, the House has passed an enormously important bill! Wonders will never cease…
The bison is about to be America’s national mammal
Yayyyy! The Bison have (almost) been saved! Don’t y’all feel so much better now? 😉 😛
Ahem. In other news… A court finally spanks Amazon for being greedy and conning kids into spending Mom & Dad’s money. About time. Apple and Google already had their spanking.
Court holds Amazon liable for years of unauthorized in-app purchases made by kids
The settlement amount is yet to be determined.
“… hard to say whether the delegate count or the body count will be larger.”
You’re right, Bryan, this is serious business. It’s the country we have to live in, after all. But there’s a certain amount of schadenfreude on my part just watching the gerbils in the cage go round and round (to paraphrase Joni).
I had not heard about the bison being named our national mammal. Apparently, that was the least we could do! Kryten knows more about my country than I do which is a bit of an embarrassment. I think I’ve become immune to hearing about all the various Acts, Laws, and other useless regulations that come out of Washington. There’s a numbness that starts in…
(Dang, my computer space key doesn’t seem to want to work appropriately. I have to hit it two to three times before it will act. One more thing to figure out. I really don’t have anything to do, right?)
I would have been happier if they thought humans were the national mammal and worthy of preservation, but that would be too much to expect from a Congress that doesn’t want to come to work or do anything useful.
That is one of the reasons I object to in-app purchases in any form. I could be away from my iPad for five minutes and find out that they cats have ordered ‘the complete Englebert Humperdinck on 8-track tapes’. I don’t do “one-click” anything on the ‘Net that involves money.
[Joni knows enough to stay in Canada 😉
Oh, I have periods when my space bar acts weirdly, usually when commenting at a WordPress site. I don’t know if it is the keyboard, the browser or the commenting code, but it usually goes away before I get a screwdriver.
Kryten knows more about my country than I do…
Ehh… I did live there over a year, and these days, I only know what people tell me or I read about in the media. Both of which I take with a boulder of salt! I generally check few to several (somewhat) reputable sources, depending on what I find of interest, or just amusing. 😉 😀
Yeah, first thing I did with the phone & tablet was disable the store’s and any purchases without authority. I did buy a couple useful app’s for the phone by reputable developers. It’s a big con. Whenever I see an app carefully worded “FREE to install” I know it’s probably a con.
I have about half a dozen cheap keyboards in a cupboard that I’ve bought the past decade, most of which ended up with dodgy space bars. They work, but are either not nice to use for long, or just flaky. About what to expect from a keyboard costing under $50.
My new(ish) Gigabyte Osmium keyboard cost US$130. It’s as good as I’d expect for one costing that much! Given I use it for anything from a few to several hours a day, I really had no choice. Buying a KB for $40 or so only to have to replace it after about a year (or less in a couple instances) is stupid. 🙂 It’s wonderful to have a KB with long-life mechanical switches again (which are guaranteed for 50 million presses), and true n-key rollover – NKRO (they claim 64, no idea who would need that! Anyone with a kitty that’s hoping for a sonnet I guess! I think 10 would have been enough, maybe 12 for a few rare individuals.) 😉 And the key tops are a good size and nicely spaced for my big hands & fingers!) I can type at my usual 80+ WPM. 😀 The space bar is a pleasant surprise. Most of the others were useless unless you pressed them pretty much dead center. I tried, just for fun, just pressing this space bar right on the very corner with my pinkie, and I got a nice “space”. Of course, I use my thumb normally, and that works perfectly over the full width of the large space bar. Bonus! 😀
The Ducky keyboard I bought about 2 years ago is really good also & has the same mechanical switches. but it’s keys are a little smaller (pretty much *normal* size for a non-typist). But it fine for my tablet & notebook. It only just beginning to show signs of wear on the keys, but still has at least a few years left before it becomes telling. 🙂
You sometimes get what you pay for. Something of a minor miracle these days.
Ohhhh my! You HAVE to watch this! Pure gold! LMAO
Kid’s react to Donald Trump
So, how come some pre-teen kids are smart, then become somewhat stupid teen’s, then completely moronic adults? De-evolution at work? Ahhh! US *education*! I understand now. 😉 😛
Hmmm. That explains why our LNP want to mirror the US education system here! 🙁
The US “education system” isn’t much of a system and there isn’t a lot of evidence that anyone gets an education anymore. Some states have uniformity in their schools, but other states allow individual local school district do whatever the local school board decides.
Teenagers are supposed to be a PITA – it’s part of the transition to becoming an adult. The problem in US politics and society is that so many people never made it beyond their teens. They are stuck in middle school and refuse to grow up. Every school had a ‘Donald Drumpf” smoking behind the bleachers trying to prove how tough he was.
As a firm rule I spend as much as I can afford on keyboards and displays to get the best set up for my vision and typing style. For Years I used real IBM keyboards because they had the same feel as the IBM Selectric that I used at the office. In the military it was Royal Model 88s and Teletype ASR-33s that gave you hands that could not only crush steel beer cans, but the truck that delivered them 😉
You get what you pay for until the original stock runs out and they out-source production to the lowest bidder or someone buys the company and drops the product as not having a high enough profit margin 😈
Curiously, around and about, I hear a prevailing theory that the Don is only running to get Clinton into the Whitehouse. She is pretty much funded by friends of his… Don’t know… But it really wouldn’t surprise me. And again curiously, I think she’d be more dangerous than him. He’s too stupid to cause as much trouble as she can. The USA would pretty much stall until he’s out, and I doubt there are many globally that would take him seriously. I really don’t trust Clinton, not at all.
Here are a couple examples of many stories speculating about Trump being a plant. He is friends with the Clintons and has donated significant money to them.
Could Trump be a Democratic plant?
Brent Budowsky: Is Trump a Clinton plant?
There is even this theory: “Is it possible that Hillary is a Republican and Trump a Democrat?” LOL Yeah. Trump has donated a lot to Dem’s over the years. And Hillary does love the big money. *shrug* Ahhhh… politic’s. 😀 The most dishonest *profession* in the World!
The spanner is Bernie. But there is a LOT going against him! He wants to *fix* things! And the money can’t have that!
Normally I would agree that Drumpf would be harmless, but the GOP will possibly obtain control of Congress. At a minimum it means the Supreme Court will be majority Republican. with a majority in both Houses of Congress there is no telling how much damage ‘the Donald’ would do.
The guy doesn’t do favors for other people, other people do favors for him. He didn’t expect to win when he started, but he is looking like the likely candidate for the Republicans. At this point it doesn’t matter if Trump is the candidate – the Republican Party has torn itself apart.
Yes, Hillary Clinton is a hawk and trigger happy. I won’t vote for her. If she is the Democratic candidate I will vote for the Greens again. I don’t do the ‘lesser of two evils’.
Well, I’m back in the land of the living after two days of stomach flu. I won’t digust anyone with the gory details, but I did warn anyone in the house to not get between me and the bathroom. It would not turn out well!
Okay, my space bar is back in business. I use a laptop, so I don’t have a separate keyboard like you guys. It frees me up to go anywhere with it, and ever since they came out with 4GB RAM for laptops a few years ago, they handle everything that I will ever need. Bryan, you and Kryten are in a different category of computer users with your “long life mechanical switches” and “true n-key rollovers”. WTH? LOL.
Speaking of each other’s countries, Kryten, I just noticed that the originator of Bitcoin is Australian. Good job, Aussies!
Bryan, I have to agree with you on Trump. He’s too ego-maniacal to be running for the benefit of someone else. But that’s an issue with almost anyone who’s running. The people who could be good public servants and stewards don’t want to run. The ones that do run are almost guaranteed to be interested in the power of being president. Wrong answer. At least it’s the wrong answer for the voting public. I think that’s what makes our voting so conflicted and emotional.
OT: I’m very concerned about my male dog Blue (yes, I think everyone in the mountains should have at least one dog named Blue!). His third eyelid is up in both of his eyes covering about 2/3 of his eye. It’s horrible looking. We’re off to the vets in a few minutes. This can be something relatively innocuous, but it can also be a sign of a couple of very serious issues. Poor guy. He’s my best bud.
The stomach flus all suck because there are usually more than one flavor around, so if you get one, another is probably coming your way. I hate to bum you out Juanita, but after the first round I avoid meeting people or shaking hands, especially if someone has one of those pits of pestilence, a small child. Daycare workers and elementary school teachers should wear hazmat suits.
We use laptops, but when possible we plug in better keyboards and displays. Just looking at any of the keyboards that I have used for any length of time it would be obvious that I hit the space bar with my right thumb and favor my left little finger for the shift key. I’m a text person and don’t like leaving the home row when I’m working.
In the early days of the Republic people chose their candidates, people didn’t run for office. I don’t understand why a sane person would put with the aggravation to earn 20% of what a Division I football couch makes in a year.
Sorry to hear about Blue [blue tick hound?] It is always stressful when our fur babies are sick.
“…pits of pestilence, a small child.”
Exactly! I had just been visiting my brother who has a special needs grandchild about 8 yo. He likes me so he tends to crawl over me a lot.
Yep, I also use the right thumb exclusively for the space key. I have a nice little indent on the far right of the space bar. I alternate fairly evenly between right and left shift keys though.
Blue’s daddy had to have been a full-blooded blue tick hound as he looks just like one with his blue coloring and ticking, but he does not have the long hang-dog ears of the full blooded hound. It actually gives him a much more open handsome face than the standard blue tick. And he’s a hoss, 85 lbs., but he’s not overweight.
The vet believes he can rule out glaucoma and some other serious issues, so he’s left with thinking he may have gotten into something that created an allergic reaction. He really is looking better now with the third eyelid in it’s proper place most of the time, but as you can imagine he really loves that thread of eye gel that I have to put in there 4 times a day. 4 times! Getting an 85 lb dog to sit for that is more like some comedy routine that I’d rather be a spectator of than a participator.
Eye gel and kittens is not a lot of fun, but required for a common infection among feral kittens that cost one of my neighbor’s cats an eye. The momma cats know better than to lick it, and will usually abandoned the affected kitten, so it is up to Dave or I to treat it. We definitely don’t get any cooperation. You are dealing with 100 times the weight but he can’t climb trees or people.
Glad to hear it is readily treatable, even if it isn’t easily done.
Sorry, been AWOL myself. Glad you are better hipparchia and Blue too!! I had a dog named blue, he was a blue healer so… 😉 😀 Of course, there is *that* song. 😀 It’s always a terrible time when they get sick or hurt.
I get gastro bugs often and easily, so you certainly have my sympathies!
Most people have less hygiene than a dog or cat. And dog’s lick their own genitals! LOL Just sayin…
Yeah, kids are disease carriers. I blame the parents. I’ve had to train myself not to touch my face & to wash my hands with a hospital grade anti-bacterial, disinfectant cleaner in a pump bottle after going out, especially on the bus. And if I see the bus is full of kids, I get a cab. It’s helped reduce my infection rate hugely. Another place I refuse to go is Hospital waiting rooms! If I must, I make the nurse get me a face mask (and by law, they have to comply). It’s handy knowing ones rights.
I always have a KB/mouse for my laptops also. Just much easier when I’m home. I really needed one with this tablet & the damned phone! The on-screen KB is better on the 11″ tablet than the 5″ phone, but I’m glad I got my little Bluetooth KB for when I go out. 🙂
Best of luck & wishes hipparchia. Take care of you & blue! 😀
And good luck with the election. We could do with some of that also. *sigh* What a f*cked up World! I’m beginning to understand the genocidal maniacs throughout history. Though most were driven by a religious fervor (whilst also being batshit insane, Though that pretty much defines all religious zealots. Curious how many lunatics find *religion*! I suppose it’s a great way to justify any insanity.) Religion is *ALWAYS* the wrong reason to do anything! Yes h… It’s a good thing I’m not running the World! 😉 😀
“Do you believe in God?” “Yes.” “Fine. Let me help you. If you do meet him, please let us know”. *BANG* “Next!” 👿 heh, heh, heh…
So, I’m not in a very forgiving mood. I have reasons not to be. We just got our new budget! If these bastards get elected… *shrug* Sue me.
LOL I’ve been investigating animals that exhibit intelligent behavior and emotions for Pinterest. I knew about several, but wanted to find others primarily. I found one that surprised me because it’s not a species typically thought to be intelligent, and they are common to Florida. 😀 And the best part that did amuse me greatly, is they are more intelligent than Conservatives (Republicans there, Liberals here, etc.) Also most religious fundamentalists etc.
“When in captivity, the Anole have shown that they have the ability to count and solve problems. They can remember when they’ve gone wrong in the past and can try new approaches instead of repeating their previous mistakes, or they can adapt their techniques to different conditions or situations – even faster than most birds or mammals. It’s been said that Anole’s are smarter than birds because birds have a larger body-to-brain ratio. There are over 400 species of Anoles in the reptile class and they seem particularly adept at adapting to new environments.”
And they are a cute little guy, predominantly green or brown.
So there ya go Bryan, there is intelligence in Florida! 😈 😆
here’s another little fella that Scientists say have an ability better than human’s:
“Rats are highly intelligent animals that exhibit high agility and endurance. While being used in scientific research, lab rats have been known to find loopholes, shortcuts and even get-away routes in lab experiments planned by scientists. When their survival instincts kick in, rats are capable of swimming three days straight and can even jump five times their distance. Their ability to map out their surroundings and even replay events in their minds as they happened is unmatched even by humans. Their innate curiosity allows them to employ critical thinking and devise backup plans in problem-solving.”
This is fun! 😀 Did you know Squid’s are intelligent and create games to alleviate boredom? 🙂
It’s Juanita from the Blue Ridge, Kryten, not Hipparchia from Pensacola.
We have anoles and geckos all over the place. The geckos are invasive, probably escaped pets, while the anoles are native. FDR was an anole while Reagan was a turkey.
Oops! Mia culpa. 🙁 Sorry Juanita… I do know the difference. I’m nursing a bad head cold. No excuse, just a kind of explanation. Brain not working. *sigh* First time turning computer on in a couple days. 🙂 Needed to check email.
LOL @ FDR/Reagan. Sounds right. 😀
My new NAS arrived about 20 min’s ago, which is why I’m not in my nice warm bed! Plus, needed to take Vit C & med’s anyway. 🙂 Might unpack it tomorrow… Eye’s hurt now! *shrug*
I was serious about FDR. He went through dozens of programs, keeping the ones that worked and dumping the ones that didn’t. He didn’t care who came up with them, i.e. political party or ideological position, if they sounded reasonable he would try them to see what happened. Some of them were illegal or unconstitutional, but they got tried anyway until the courts intervened.
It is rather hard to think when you can’t breathe normally and your head feels like you are wearing a lead hat. It’s one of the joys of winter. I wish you health.
Yeah, I knew what you meant about FDR.
Finally felt well enough to catch up on things. Haven’t unpacked the NAS. Weekend job.
Just before the cold hit, I finally found a good combination to get Win10 working well without any spying. I just finished testing on a fresh Win10 Pro install on my notebook. It involved a lot of trial & error, and reading a large number of respected & trusted sources relating to Win10 & M$ security & performance (or lack thereof).
I need to format up a concise summary with links. I’ll try to get it done soon, as I need to make a record for my own purposes and my blog when it’s up. 🙂
Speaking of my blog… I’ve used about half of my free year with Arvixe. My experience so far is OK, but nothing exceptional at all. I’ve been a member for several years of several sites specializing in web hosting (such as WebHostingTalk). After reading many reviews, & chat’s with experts in the field, I’ve decided to sign up with a relatively new hosting provider (about 3 years old) called WebHostFace to host my personal blog and use as a testing site for others. For an amazing stroke of luck (which worries me as it almost always is followed by some really bad luck), I was emailed an offer for their Face Extra SSD Hosting Plan 5-Yr subscription @ US$67.15 (normally US$654). It’s a good plan and I’m amazed by their service! They actually PHONED me (never happened before) and had my blog migrated from Avixe in about 15 min’s (given that WP is domain dependent, that’s impressive since they would have had to make changes to the MySQL DB & some .php files). I was actually going to start from scratch, but the tech guy convinced me it wouldn’t be necessary. And he was right. 😀
It includes SSL/SSH, CloudFlair CDN, R1Soft daily backups, and pretty much unlimited everything! Also, you can get 1 free domain. 🙂
If anyone is interested: WebHostFace Web Hosting Plans – Shared Hosting (Note that the price of $5.45/mth is currently a 50% off deal they have).
The special deal of 5yr for $67 (actually, it’s $79, I get an extra 15% off as a premium member) expires in a day:
Face Extra Hosting Plan: 5-Yr Subscription
So, two good things happened this month (the NAS and this), one more to go, then the bad. The “Rule of three” applies as usual! *shrug* 😉
My California client mentioned that his local support guy was going back to Win 7 on the all of the machines on his office network. Win 10 might think they were good for Win 10, but reality intervened. If a machine is more than a couple of years old something just won’t work in Win 10 Pro. The local guy said they should just wait until machines fail and Win 10 comes on the new box.
I’ve been working with this business since the 1980s, I started when it was owned by the father of the current owner, and wrote a dBASE II program to run under CP/M on a Kaypro portable. They are stilling using a variation of that rewritten for a PC & MS-DOS.
The cold has to count a “bad thing”, so you can’t be sure which three cycle you are in 😉
Ooooooh! The memories…
I mentioned in another comment recently that I had a Kaypro *luggable* with the small CRT & 5.25″ FDD (and space to keep FD’s). 😀
And curiously… I used it & dBASE II for three clients way back then. One was a small Transport company (called Ladybird Transport! A name I will never forget. LOL) One was a company that designed wedding outfits, and the third was called “Getty Finance”! Apparently started by a black sheep of the Getty family that escaped to Aus., but couldn’t escape the family *business*! But… they paid the best! In fact, because of that job (where I worked for almost a year), I was able to open my computer store in the Melbourne CBD! 😀
I worked with ICL to create a dual-CPU PC that would run CP/M-MP/M & DOS/Win2 (Had an 8085 & 8088). 🙂 Was orange! LOL
*sigh* I do miss those days. :/
I’ll be dual-booting W10 & W7, with XP & linux on VM images (also W10 & W7 as images for when I boot the *other* OS. 🙂
Ah, yes MP/M & Southwest Technical Products – terminals connected via RS-232 used for WordStar and dBASE. They worked better than anything else in their price range, but there weren’t too many people in that price range. It was hard to believe that people were willing to pay $15K for a IBM-XT and NEC Spinwriter.
They built the Kaypros in San Diego county, so ours were ‘factory fresh’.
I didn’t have a Kaypro or a Compaq, I had a Panasonic with a built in printer. I got it from a local computer store that I did a lot of installations for when they decided not to carry the line. The people who owned the store were in the ‘business’ and didn’t like computers all that much.
Well, this has been a strange week, health-wise. You were right, Bryan. About the time I thought it was all over, I felt like I hit a wall. No energy, and the dogs can’t figure out why they have not been out for their regular bike rides! No way.
At least Blue is looking like his normal self again. It could have been something much worse! And the eye gel thingy is over, thank all the good Dogs! How in the world you manage with cats is beyond me. It took all my management skills to handle Blue. About half the time, he’d jerk his head and the string of gel would land on his snout somewhere.
And Kryten, I figured you knew the difference! No problem. Nobody has been feeling themselves this week. Glad to hear that someone else liked the name Blue! Blue heelers are great dogs, usually a one person kind of dog.
Hi Juanita! 😀 (I double checked this time! 😉 LOL) Really glad you & Blue are better! Give the guy a pat for me (and give yourself one too! Good boy, good girl)! 😉 LOL
I know about that damned wall too. Thought I was feeling much better Fri., then spent pretty much all of Sun in bed! It’s pretty chilly today (was about 6C an hour ago), so heater is on and coffee is hot! 😀 I do feel much better today. So, I will finally unpack and setup my new toy. 😀
Not many people (who haven’t owned one) know about blue’s being a “one person dog”. They sure are! 😀 Red healers are a bit more open to others, but are a lot dumber than blue’s! LOL But they are very loyal and very tough! With their strength & locking jaw, it’s a really bad idea to piss one off if you don’t want to loose a hand or foot!
My little shop grew pretty fast, I was quite surprised actually! It was one of three computer shops in Melb then, and had the best location opposite Flinder’s St. Station (the main Railway Station in Melb.), so we got all the commuters passing all day long. I learned “Location, location… Location!” And “Cash flow is King!” We were the only store that catered for home & business users, the other two were business only. Back then, Computer companies came knocking on our door to sell their products! We had an endless stream, even companies I’d never heard of. 😀 After a year, we sold Apple II’s, IBM PC’s, Kaypro’s, Osborn 1, Panasonic’s (I know the one you mean), ICL, TI, and a bunch of Apple clones with names like “Pineapple”, “Peach” etc! LOL Also IBM clones. We were making an average of 250%-350% profit!! But, we got a lot of commercial business because we actually knew our stuff! Even had networking (Banyan Vines and Corvus OmniNet). My partner & I were engineers and we hired only tech people! We had the top s/w of the day: VisiCalc, SuperCalc, WordStar (and the other *Star’s), Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, PC-Outline (which ended up being sold to Brown Bag Software – A name difficult to forget) etc. on CP/M-MP/M & DOS, and games of course! We had computers set up in little alcoves and allowed parents to bring kids and let them play on weekends! Amazing how many computers those kids sold! We gave them a few games & WordStar for free. So they did OK out of it. Gave them good discounts too. We only gouged large companies! LOL 😀 Business got insane thanks to the “Word of mouth” grapevine, & newsletters we mailed out with lot’s of tip’s etc, and started publishing programs in BASIC, games & things like a budget manager & a Recipe manager (that was hugely popular!) That was the time I was doing the dBase jobs. I actually hated working retail. 🙂
After 2 years, I sold my share to my partner & due to events at the time, joined the Military with my 2 best mates. It all seems so pointless and stupid now. I know we did some good… But there was the *other* stuff. :/ *shrug*
Oh! My mind has been turning thinking about all that! I remember we were the first company in Aus. to sell Hard Drives. Corvus made a 5 & 10 MB Winchester drive, originally for Apple II (on a hacked Apple DOS), then the PC. Even had a network backup system the business’s loved! I remember also that OniNet was a much cheaper & simpler alternative to Ethernet. From memory, I think Ethernet then was 3 Mbps & OmniNet was 1 Mbps (pretty fast then) & ran on twisted pair rather than the thick Ethernet cables back then!) 😀 Yeah… Fun times! 🙂
LOL I was just ordering another copy of Softmaker Office for my tablet (they have 35% off now )+ a free copy of Partition Master Pro that I use and could use another license… Anyway, I decided to check their blog, and they have a new blogger. Their office kitty! LOL He’s appeared before, usualy because he’s pretty lazy, even for a cat! 😉 😀
Ladies and Gentlemen: Here is Kitty, our new blogger
Has a couple pic’s of Kitty, doing what he does best (apparently!) 😉 Enjoy. 😀
I stock generic unflavored Pedialyte whenever I feel something coming on because it easy to get dehydrated and have all of the symptoms of a hangover with none of the fun that preceded it. It is cheaper than Gatorade and the University of Florida football program doesn’t get a royalty.
I’m glad to hear that Blue is feeling better. With cats you wear gauntlets and use the ‘Momma cat neck pinch’ that was copied by the Vulcans. The has to use curved forceps to get a pill in a cat, so I pulverize them, mix them with the water from a tuna can, and dose with an oral syringe. Still, my tetanus shot is always up to date 😉
I had almost successfully forgotten about Adam Osborne and his suitcase. I preferred the Panasonic because, while the Compaq was more common, you needed star bits for your screwdriver to work on the damn thing.
I was very happy not to be in retail directly because there were a lot of people who bought computers because ‘they had to have one’, even though they didn’t know what they were going to do with it and were annoyed when you explained about applications, etc. Some people really got upset when I would tell them that their manual system for their business was more efficient and cost effective than a computer would be.
There is no real explaining the decisions we made when young, but we spend the rest of our lives thinking about them. There are a lot of things that I would do differently, but then I wouldn’t be the person I became and wouldn’t know that I had messed up. This a puzzlement… 🙂
I make a coconut water/banana/blueberry/strawberry smoothie. It re-hydrates faster than water and has the electrolytes & Vit C etc. It works well, especially because I just can’t eat solids when I get sick. I also have soups. 🙂
I actually didn’t mind dealing with *normal* people that came in. And I really enjoyed sparring with suppliers! LOL But I hated dealing with the big company know-it-all’s that usually knew next to nothing! In the third meeting with a large company I had enough! After 5 min’s I stood up and said “Gentlemen! Obviously you have plenty of time on your hands, but I have a business to run and customers to look after who don’t waste my time! Whenever you make a decision, please do call; otherwise, please don’t! You need me! I don’t need you! Thank you!” They wanted a written guarantee we wouldn’t sell to their competitors! I said that that could be done, for about half a $million to cover potential lost revenue! Four month’s later, a guy in his early 40’s came in. He was the new IT manager for that company. He first apologized and said let’s get down to business. We signed the deal a few day’s later after lawyers/accountants vetted the proposal. 🙂 I wish they were all like that! Most have this attitude of “We are a giant fish! You are a minnow. We can do what we please, and you have to like it!” Uhh… NO! No, I certainly do not! Please drop dead! Just because I don’t have an MBA, does not mean I am stupid or that I have no idea about business!
Sure, I know. 🙂 And I am realistic enough to know what is done is done. I don’t actually dwell on the past, but I do think about it. I am sure that, like you, I wouldn’t be who I am either. Our past defines our present, and us. 🙂
Well, my new NAS is in the process of setting up the RAID on the 4 HDD’s. Looks like it will take about 30 hours! Oh well, it’s not urgent. 😀
Your NAS process sounds like the old days of formatting hard drives for Novell Netware – it was measured with a calendar not a watch.
Your version would be too sweet for me when I’m dehydrated, but just about right for a hot summer day. Soup and vanilla “Instant Breakfast” with half a banana blended in for sustenance [or a hot fudge banana split, I’m a life long milk drinker].
I generally worked with the end users, not all of whom knew a computer was coming. There was a secretary who saw the computer and had me give her boss a note saying that if her typewriter was not returned and the computer removed, she was resigning. For a while I thought she was going to heave the monitor at the boss. The whole time I was unpacking things the boss was telling her how much easier her job would be with a computer, but she was older and didn’t want to learn a whole new system for doing her job. A lot of people are like that and you have to learn to duck…
I hated going to the meetings and realizing that client didn’t really know what they wanted to do and were looking for free advice and consultation. To stay in business you had to know when to say enough and if they wanted consultation they were going to have to pay for it. Plumbers got paid for advice, so should computer people 🙂
Getting the NAS ready is a multi-step process, especially for Windows. 🙂
I decided after much thought to use RAID 5. My priorities are read performance and space. RAID 0 would give me the best performance, but even over a Load Balanced 2 x GbE (essentially 2 GbE from the NAS) it’s pointless as the LAN would be the bottleneck. RAID 1 means I loose half the capacity, same with RAID 6 (which is really pointless with only 4 HDD’s). RAID 5 gives me 75% of the capacity (12 TB), good read performance, slightly improved write performance, and 1 drive failure. The fact is that with most of these low-end NAS units, the controller is more likely to fail than the NAS certified HDD’s. I do an incremental backup to an external 2TB enterprise HDD constantly (in a USB3 drive dock, so when it fill’s, I just swap with a new HDD), and my big NAS once a day.
First the RAID type is selected then the drives are ‘synchronized’. That takes the most time, It actually finished quicker than I guesstimated. 😀 About 20 hours.
Then the volumes are created. I decided on a single volume. Keep it simple! 😉 Then formatted.
Some of the tools I need, and even Win10 components, won’t work with a network drive! So I had to create an iSCSI target. Ever since Win7 (maybe Vista) Win has included an iSCSI initiator (client). This makes the iSCSI target look like a local drive which can be mounted & formatted by Win. The nice things is that all three of my Win10 systems *think* it’s a local drive. Though, you can get into trouble if more than one tries to read/write at the same time! There are ways around that, but I doubt I’ll be using more than 1 machine at a time! LOL
I like milk too! Being raised on a dairy farm spoiled me! And the fresh milk tasted a lot better too. *shrug* When I have a cold, I often make a *hot chocolate* with 100% pure cacao powder! Tastes good and is very high in anti-oxidants & iron etc. 🙂
You remind me of a potential client I turned down. 🙂 Was called Diamond Valley Oil, they were a home heating oil supplier. Was very popular here back then. 🙂 Anyway, they asked me to see what kind of computer & s/w would be good for them. I went and met their secretary/bookkeeper who was in her late 60’s. She was not at all happy with the idea of a computer! Anyway, I spent over an hour with her. She was amazing! Knew everything about the clients, who owed what, what they ordered & when, even their birthday’s! Everything! But she had everything on file in 6 filing cabinets also. I went to the owner and said a computer was no use to him. But he should double the bookkeeper’s pay because if they lost her, they were screwed! LOL
When I was a project manager, I put a sign up behind my desk that stated “I don’t need you to understand the problem or the solution. I need you to get out of my way so I can fix it!” I pointed to it often, usually when my presence was requested at a pointless meeting. I would attend one weekly management meeting. That was all. I had far better things to do. I had another sign that stated “If you haven’t thought about the problem, do NOT ask me to help!”
I was a terror! 😉 😀 But my record speaks for itself. So screw them!
A single volume? I hope you aren’t intending to run chkdsk or fsck on that anytime soon! I generally try to keep my volumes at around 1TB max in size, because fsck after a system crash becomes annoying after that.
Regarding disk drives versus NAS controller lifespans, I spend a lot of time swapping out hard drives in fully functional NAS systems that are 5+ years old, so I can’t agree. Of course, this is all commercial grade hardware, not consumer grade hardware, so (shrug). Maybe that has something to do with it.
Rotating storage is on its way out, and that whole RAID initialization nonsense is one reason why. There’s no reason why a RAID system can’t operate in a log-oriented manner, where writes start at block 0 and work their way upwards and are mapped to logical blocks via a map somewhere. Well, no reason except that’d be excruciatingly slow on rotating storage. It wouldn’t be any problem at all on SSD…
LOL Yeah, I did consider the downsides of a single volume. Thing is, I already have over 6 TB of data that I’m migrating over from 3 USB 2TB HDD’s and a couple 1TB drives. One of the externals is almost 4 years old (USB2) and I really don’t think it’s going to last much longer. I pulled the drives out of their cases and bought a dual drive USB 3.1/Thunderbolt docking station. My “build from hell” has an Intel “Alpine Ridge” USB3.1/Thunderbolt controller and 2 ports on the back (Gigabyte is the only manufacturer currently that has this, which is one reason I bought this MoBo).
Prometeus recently concluded a 12 mth test of enterprise HDD’s in their big HDS SAN. 200 drives each from HDS, WD, SG. The WD’s had a significantly higher failure rate and lower performance. HDS & SG were pretty close on both (from memory, I think it was 19 WD failed, 6 SG, 7 HDS.)
However, reading the forums and user reports on on NAS’s like my new one intended for Home/SMB’s, the consensus is that the controller is the usual point of failure. There’s no redundancy for a start (except for the dual GbE interface). One typical recommendation is to remove the fan Seagate use (which was an 800 RPM 120mm unit, but I think that’s been upgraded on more recent builds) for something better. Of course, that voids the 3 yr warranty. *shrug* I do have a couple spare 1,600 RPM 120mm fan’s… However, I don’t think temp’s are an issue for me. I’ve been monitoring them and the drives have stayed in the 30’s & the case temp is around 38/39C. CPU is generally 36C-38C according to the monitor logs. Curiously, the drives temp decrements by 1C from left to right. 😀 currently, 33C – 30C. It seems Seagate heard the criticisms of the unit cooling and use a better fan. I have seen the RPM’s vary between 600-1,000 RPM. Apparently, it used to be static @ 800. *shrug* If so, nice to see! 😀
Overall so far, I am quite impressed with this little NAS. Especially given I got it for a bargain of AU$250 (compared to almost AU$4k for the Buffalo! Though, that has redundant everything and is built for long-term Enterprise use, so…) 😉 Even the linux based NAS OS 4.2 is pretty good, especially at housekeeping. I was watching the processes for awhile last night… and they spend the majority of their time sleeping (as they should!) then quickly wake and do what they do then sleep again. 🙂 I’ve never seen the RAM usage higher than 25%, it’s typically around 16%. Plus a dynamic drive cache of course. The dual-core Atom C2338 is typically between 5 & 20%.
Seagate have the source code available on the NAS site, but I haven’t d/l it. Don’t really have the inclination nor time to trawl through a mass of code! LOL
Seagate seem to be serious about the OS (bear in mind all this came from their takeover of LaCie. A good thing because the Segate NAS’s prior to that sucked!) Updates come quickly, the forums indicate I can expect 1-3 a week! Had one today already, a performance improvement & updates to newer releases of system components.
Anyway, I digress! LOL I plan to get all the data off the externals as fast as possible, then plug the NAS into my big switch & transfer it all to the big NAS. Then I’ll create 2 x 2TB +2 x 4TB volumes.
I currently have the iSCSI Header Digest enabled, I’m still undecided if I will enable the Data Digest when I create the new volumes, there will be a slight performance hit, but I doubt that will be an issue, & the extra data integrity may be useful. Also thinking about whether to enable CHAP or Mutual CHAP (and/or Authorized Initiator) for extra security. The unit will be storing all my business & client data and development data… I do have high security on the big NAS (including FDE on the SED’s). I’ll have to think about that.
Speaking of old RAID being on the way out (and it was developed ’87-’88, so I think it’s passed it’s ‘use by” date), I watched an online insider conference sponsored by Samsung recently regarding their new SSD’s and roadmap for the next 5 years. They have a consumer grade 4TB SSD (in the 850 Pro/EVO series) later this year, finally a 1 TB 950 Pro M.2 NVMe (that many, including myself, have been hoping for), and have introduced an horribly expensive Enterprise 15.36 TB SSD (PM1633a @ about $8k)! They have actually increased the manufacture process from 32 to 40 nm because this actually improves the life (especially TBW) and cost of the V-NAND chips, which are now 48 layer with greater depths coming (64 layer with the controller able to R/W 64 bit’s to a 64-layer stack which will improve performance quite significantly apparently). 😀 They way they are racing away… Samsung may be the only SSD maker in the race in the not too distant future! That will be a worry.
One of the reasons I chose to use the two 512GB 950 Pro’s on my “build from hell” was not just the speed, but because they had a longer life expectancy of 800 TBW (double the 850 Pro & 4x the EVO). Data will be R/W to them pretty much constantly, so that was an important consideration for me. Interestingly, the Win boot speed hardly improved (which I don’t care about anyway), but loading & running app’s lie Photoshop… Man! Incredibly fast! I saved a 1.3 GB multi-layer image I was working on @ it was done before my finger came up from pressing the mouse button! 😀 On my old HDD, I’d go make a coffee. I only store the OS, current work app’s & files on the 950. The rest is on the 2x 1TB 850’s.
Oh well. Only time will tell, right? 😉 All I can do is make the best decisions possible with the info & tools I have. I learned long ago there is no such thing as “a perfect solution”. Everything is a trade off in the end. 🙂 *shrug*
My NAS has eight fans aside from the two on the redundant power supplies, and I paid $0 for it. Of course, intercepting it between the supply room and the dumpster had a lot to do with that ;).
HDS and Western Digital are the same company now, so it’s odd that they’d have such different mortality rates. In my own infrastructure the clear winner is the Toshiba drives, I have a set of 5 year old Toshiba drives that have no grown defects and which show every sign of being ready to go on for another 5 years of 24/7 use. Seagate pops like popcorn. WD RE drives are a bit better but I’ve still tossed a dozen of those over the past three years between all of my disk cabinets (that’s 10 disk cabinets, 120 drives, so that’s about a 10% failure rate), though granted they’d been hard used before we got them (all our gear is second hand purchased from the assets of a defunct company).
It’s looking to me like SSD’s are going to pass a certain cost per terabyte price point shortly that’s going to render rotational storage irrelevant for anything other than long-term archival storage. It’s already to the point where my last two workstation builds were SSD because it made no sense to buy rotational storage as their system disk with SSD prices being so cheap nowadays. Average workstation can get by just fine with 250gb and those SSD’s are *cheap* nowadays. Even if I splurge and put in 512gb SSD’s, we’re still talking almost trivial expense.
It’s the opportunities in enterprise storage for solid state storage that make me salivate, but that in turn means the end of traditional RAID because traditional RAID is *horrible* when combined with SSD’s. SSD’s want to be written sequentially, not at random all over the place in a pattern calculated to make it faster for rotational storage to access. SSD’s don’t like overwrites, while RAID stripe writes are almost pure overwrites. Seems to me both block storage and filesystems need to catch up with the times when it comes to solid-state storage, the requirements of solid-state storage simply are too alien to those things built around the limitations of rotational storage.
It’s always nice when you “get lucky” with an acquisition! Especially as it’s usually rare. 😀 I really wanted the 6-bay NAS that they had on special for $300! An extra two bay’s, RAM and a couple other bit’s for $50 more was a no brainier. But I missed it by a day. Deal was “until stocks run out”, which they obviously did on the 6-bay. Oh well. 🙂 I wouldn’t have populated it with 6 HDD’s BTW. Next year, I would have replaced the 4x 4TB with 6 x 6TB with RAID 5E. But I certainly cannot complain. 🙂 Anyway, the Samsung roadmap showed 6 TB consumer SSD’s next year. At this rate, the only reason to buy an HDD would be very low cost. I also had planned to buy a 12-bay expansion unit next year for my Buffalo (it supports up to 4 for 60 bay’s total). But with everything that’s happened the past 12+ months, I’m not sure about that. We’ll see.
It seems Seagate are moving away from traditional RAID (though they do of course support the standard modes). Their SimplyRAID is interesting. 🙂 It seems to be a variant on RAID 5, but allows for drive expansion without having to resync/format the RAID. It also automatically determines the security (reliability) depending on the number of drives in an array. Up to 5 drives supports a single drive failure (RAID 5), 6+ is dual-drive fail (from the performance spec’s, I’m guessing this is 5E not 6).
One problem with the Samsung 950 Pro m.2 is that the controller & V-NAND chips get hot with sustained use and they throttle down quite a bit with a noticeable performance hit! So they need to be cooled if being constantly used, as I do. Luckily, I keep a lot of bit’s and pieces, and had a pack of 8 EnzoTech forged pure copper heatsinks w/ 3M adhesive thermal pads designed for graphics card RAM I got for a project I changed my mind on. I thought they may come in handy one day! 😀 Now that I’ve removed the drive cages from the front of the case, the two front Noctua 3,000 RPM fans & the side mounted Corsair fan blow right over the 950’s. 🙂 Hasn’t throttled at all as far as I can tell today. I did put a temperature probe on each (connected to the Corsair Commander Mini) as well as the Sumsung monitoring utility, and the temps are significantly lower. So far, so good!
IBM and Sandisk are obviously worried. Sandisk has created a joint venture with Micron, and IBM & the duo have announced their own V-NAND (though only 2-bit, Samsung is 3-bit) and say they will have a 10 TB consumer/commercial SSD next year. I think that may be a bit late. 😉
Oh! Regarding the Prometeus HDD test… HDS said that WD have taken over manufacture of their consumer and some commercial HDD’s (Deskstar’s etc.), but the Enterprise drives are still their own. Though that will change when they need a new manufacturing facility apparently. Also, HDS still manufacture the SAN’s and will for *some time*. Prometeus were concerned about that and wanted some guarantee’s before they spent a fortune on HDS gear. They also make their own enterprise SSD’s & will be releasing their own SSD controller and possibly V-NAND chips! That will be interesting! 😉 🙂
Interesting discussion here:
https://community.hds.com/community/innovation-center/hus-place/blog/2015/07
The LaCIE is still RAID.
Sun saw the new era arriving before anybody else did, and ZFS is an admirable attempt to create a SSD-optimized filesystem before SSD’s were really ready for prime time. Unfortunately Sun didn’t survive to see the hardware technology catch up with their software technology, and now it’s all in the hands of the bottom-dwelling scumsuckers at Oracle. I have a friend who was at Sun, and is now at Oracle, and he despises Oracle with all his heart. But they keep paying him massive sums to stay, so …
BTRFS was supposed to be the Linux attempt to match ZFS. It has some really admirable features such as being able to add and remove block devices and have the filesystem rebalance redundant blocks across the remaining devices. Unfortunately, it’s also inherently unreliable and has shown that the Linux block layer and filesystem cache layer are utterly broken when it comes to SSD’s. But I won’t go further there because my next startup is somewhere in that pile ;).
Off to work I should go, I guess.
I’ve despised Ellison since I first heard of him long ago. As soon as Oracle took over MySQL, I dumped it.
There is OpenZFS, though I haven’t played with it yet. Haven’t had a need to, but may soon. 🙂 I know it’s available on flavors of Linux, freeBSD… and OS-X. I think there’s another platform also. One downside to ZFS often complained about by Admin’s is the higher than usual memory requirement. There is unRAID & FreeNAS, but from all I’ve read, not many are terribly impressed. Of course, M$ constantly tries, usually half-arsed, to roll out something. I think the current one is ReFS, but I haven’t looked at it. Being offline most of last year hasn’t helped me stay current. I’m playing catch up. 🙂
I really don’t like using RAID 5, but currently have little choice. I’ll just have to ensure constant up-to-date backups are done. The big NAS uses RAID 60 in an attempt to recover the lousy performance of RAID 6 and add another level of redundancy. One reason for my expansion plan mentioned above was to increase the array from 2 to 3 RAID 6 stripes, & eventually 4. But I’m not sure the increase in complexity is worth it. The Buffalo is certainly capable of coping (redundant Xeon E3-1275 4-core/8 thread CPU’s @ 3.4GHz + 16 GB RAM), but increasing complexity invites trouble! I’d pretty much decided to just go to RAID 10 and to hell with it! 🙂
Before I lost internet, I’d planned to learn more about BeyondRAID by… Drobo? But that would mean ditching my expensive investment in the Buffalo, or maybe keeping it as a backup. Wonder what it would fetch (populated) on eBay? *sigh* No perfect solution. *shrug*
Everyone does remember that every time we make a major purchase, within weeks a new product comes out that that is faster, better, and cheaper than whatever we bought.
As far as file systems go it would seemed to BE the Betamax/VHS conflict, the slightly worse but cheaper version always becomes the standard, while the better solution disappears.
ZFS is in no danger of disappearing. Yes, ZFS on Linux does have higher memory requirements than native filesystems since it uses its own dedicated buffer cache rather than the unified buffer cache provided by Linux, but it’s not *that* much higher. And it works. ZFS filesystems are virtually always recoverable after a system failure, unlike BTRFS, which is tree-based and if you lose the top of your tree, everything below it in the tree is *gone*, never to be seen again. Granted, ZFS wasn’t *always* that reliable, but much work has been put into making it reliable, while BTRFS is firmly in “failed project” mode, that mode in which any attempt to fix the bugs in the product fails because it introduces even more bugs than were fixed. It simply isn’t architected correctly, mostly because it tried to be friendly with the unified block layer, which simply doesn’t work for CoW filesystems like BTRFS.
There are pro’s and con’s to everything, even ZFS. 🙂 It is certainly a better solution in many ways to traditional RAID. I’ve been investigating NAS OS 4 on my Seagate and I’m pretty sure it’s using MDADM, especially since it has the ability to grow an array, which ZFS can’t do (at least, not easily). I was looking at perhaps trying one of the ZFS build’s but it seems that the consensus is that a minimum of 4 GB RAM is required & 8GB is recommended, regardless of the size of, or number of drives in, the array. This NAS has only 2 GB, and I’ve been unable to find out if that can be increased. I suspect it can as I think it uses 2 DDR3 DIMM’s, but haven’t seen any official info on that. If they could be replaced, I’d use ECC DDR3 anyway if possible, which I know the CPU supports. Growing the array isn’t a concern in my case since the NAS is fully populated. I have been toying with the idea of building my own 8 or 12 bay NAS (possibly using a controller like the ASRock Rack C2750D4I). However, when this Seagate became available for $250 & it all looked pretty good for my immediate needs, plus I had 4 NAS HDD’s, it was the cheapest & simplest solution. 🙂 There is a Debian based project to port ZFS to Seagate NAS systems, primarily the small DLNA & home NAS systems which typically only have 512MB to 1GB RAM. But they are experiencing problems making it work so far. 😉
It does appear that ZFS has been ported to work on the Buffalo NAS. I’ll look at that somewhere down the track. Also, Buffalo are apparently working on their own ZFS project to overcome the problem of easy expansion.
I plan to build a proper Workstation, perhaps next year. I have hundred’s of thousands of files now, and I’ve noticed that some are corrupt. Probably as a result of silent data corruption. Since the HDD’s think the data is OK it can’t fix it! So, EEC RAM is good.
Well, I still have a lot to do. So, back to work! 😀
Note that I wasn’t looking for a production filesystem. I use XFS as my production filesystem, it is extremely fast and reliable. What I was looking for was a filesystem to use for backups that a) could do snapshots in an efficient manner (LVM snapshots are *not* efficient, I use them to make a snapshot and then rsync the snapshot to the backup but then destroy the snapshot after backing it up), b) allow me to easily access the snapshots in a manner similar to Apple Time Machine (i.e. rolling snapshots where I could choose a snapshot that I wanted to restore a file from), c) easily replicate the filesystem geographically either via sneakernet of changesets or sending changesets over the Internet. And d) was reliable. ZFS met my needs. BTRFS failed the reliability and replication parts and makes it harder to access snapshots than ZFS does.
ZFS in its current incarnation does allow you to add additional storage after creation of the filesystem. What you cannot do, however, is change the allocation policy after creation of the filesystem. If, for example, you defined your ZFS filesystem as three pairs of mirrored drives, you can add a fourth pair of mirrored drives to expand the filesystem, but you can’t just add a single drive and tell it to rebalance.
That’s the one place where BTRFS wins, you tell BTRFS your allocation strategy for a filesystem or filesystem subset (you can set a policy at the directory level, even), and it automatically implements it across however many drives are necessary. If, for example, you have five drives and decide on a three-disk RAID5 policy, BTRFS will for each two sectors written place them on two different drives and then the XOR block on a third drive, automatically balancing across all five drives so that the stripes eventually fill all five drives up. If your filesystem is 50% full and one of your drives fails, BTRFS will rebalance across the remaining four drives, rebuilding the blocks that were on the missing drive onto the remaining four drives. Add another two drives, and BTRFS will rebalance onto the new drives, using them preferentially for blocks and moving blocks from existing drives to the new drives while maintaining the RAID policy. Decide to replace a drive, all you have to do is tell BTRFS that you want to remove a drive and it’ll move all the blocks onto other drives, then you can remove it.
The downside is that BTRFS keeps issuing “out of disk space” errors where there’s plenty of disk space because the allocator gets confused and can’t figure out how to allocate a write. ZFS’s disk allocation is fixed at disk add time so it doesn’t get confused like that. BTRFS also inherently fragments things ridiculously so really isn’t good for rotating storage, but for my purposes that wasn’t really an issue, because, as I said, I was looking for a filesystem to use for backups.
I love the concept of BTRFS. There’s no reason why, in this day and age, you and I should have to worry about how disk blocks are laid out on disk. Toss a bunch of disks in the drive, give the computer a general policy (“I want everything redundant”, for example, or “I want at least RAID5 redundancy level”), and let the bloody computer figure it out. Unfortunately, BTRFS ran into significant issues at the Linux buffer cache layer that have hindered its reliability and made it difficult to accomplish its goals. And some of the architectural decisions made, such as tree structuring everything without redundant backups of tree metadata and without fixed recovery point blocks located at fixed locations on disks, made it virtually impossible to recover filesystems once they become corrupted. For really unreliable systems I still rely on ext4, because ext4 stores things at fixed locations on disks, thus you can *always* recover an ext4 filesystem. You may not be able to recover filenames for some of the files, and some files may go missing altogether, but the filesystem itself and all uncorrupted data on the filesystem will be available with just a fsck call.
It appears that the Seagate NAS OS 4.2 uses ext4, LVM2 & MDADM. As an aside, it was sad to see Neil Brown retire at the start of the year. I met him some years ago @ UNSW at a conference. Still, Jes Sorensen is a good replacement I think. I saw his name on many change logs over the years, plus his work @ RH. I guess time will tell. I sent an email congratulating Neil on his retirement (after an announcement from the mail-list), which was apparently premature as he’s still @ SUSE Labs (metaphorically, as he works from home as do many). LOL
I’ve sent off a few questions to the Segate NAS team. Will be interesting to see what reply I get, if any. 🙂
I’ve been out of the whole loop for too long. Going to take awhile to catch up again. But necessary. 🙂 I have been keeping up to date on a few things, especially relating to backup. I’ve actually always been concerned by backing up to magnetic media due to inherent problems with long term safe storage given that any magnetic media is susceptible to data corruption/loss more easily than non-magnetic mediums. Panasonic/Sony announced some years ago their intent to develop a new high-density Blu-ray disk format for archival use. Panasonic released the Data Archiver LB-DM9. The magazine is interesting as it uses 12 disks in RAID-0 for a (current) capacity of 1.2 TB/magazine @ 216 MB/s & is about 20 mm thick. The archiver unit supports RAID 0, 5 & 6. I need to see how cost effective it is against the DLT backup systems I generally recommend to clients. I’d be happier if they used the Millenniata M-DISC for archive instead of chemical media which Panasonic claim has a life of 50+ years. Not really long enough for true archival media. M-DISC has been licensed to Verbatim & Ritek (Imation) so far, with an announcement of BD-XL availability.
And on that note, I need to check my email accounts! LOL I get about 100+ a day over 5 accounts, so they need to be checked daily or it get’s out of hand quickly. 🙂 Maybe I got a reply from Seagate. 😉 I can hope! LOL
Oh! If you’re interested, Panasonic announced a new 300 GB disk version recently (that has been cutely named “Freeze-Ray”). There is also a 100 GB disc version. Though still using chemical media unfortunately. *shrug* It was apparently developed in cooperation with Facebook curiously. 😉
They have a full size 19″ rack unit that holds up to 1.9 PB and R/W up to 1 GB/s. Wonder if NSA is buying them? LOL
It’s official I hate Win10!! Now the POS is dropping the iSCSI connection to the NAS for no apparent reason! And it fails to automatically reconnect, I have to do it manually. When I check the “Favorite Target’s” List, it has the same entry for every session that was disconnected. I have to remove the duplicate entries before it will reconnect properly. Yesterday, I booted in Win7, and so far it hasn’t dropped once. I just tried Win10 again, and within minutes of a copy of a 10GB folder of files, it dropped the connection and just sat there saying “reconnecting” until I clicked on the “connect button”. There is no reason for it, & W7 seems perfectly OK (I copied 420 GB last night).
I upgraded VMware Workstation to v12 for Linux, but haven’t upgraded my win copy yet, & VMW v10 doesn’t support W10. Thanks to the crappy exchange rate, it will cost me $190 to upgrade, which I can’t afford right now. All my usual household quarterly bills are due and of course, they are the priority. 🙂 Unfortunately, Linux still has some driver issues with all this new hardware (especially the M.2 NVMe SSD & Creative Sound Core 3D on the Z170 MoBo), so it’s better to boot Win10 for now (unfortunately) and run a Linux container. *shrug* I should be able to buy the upgrade in a couple weeks, so I guess I’ll just have to be patient. I’ll also have to check the CentOS & Mint doc’s & forums to see if all the hardware compatibility issues have been fixed. I know they have been working on that, but it hasn’t been a priority (until now). 🙂
So for now, I have my older USB 3.0 HDD dock connected to the NAS (it has 2x USB 3.0 ports primarily intended for backup DAS units) and copying the files directly. So far, that hasn’t been a problem. 🙂
That’s what I get for trusting m$ to do anything right! I’ve had nothing but ridiculous problems with W10.
Win 10 really isn’t ready for prime time. Every time I boot it acts slightly differently – things that use to work stopped working and things that seemed DOA did the Lazarus bit. The whole experience is still not showing an ROI. It was supposedly ‘free’, but my time has value and I’ve wasted too much of it trying to get the damn thing to work as well as Win 7.
Of course it is more secure – you can’t get hacked if the bloody box won’t boot!
Kryten — Windows 10 runs fine within VirtualBox, which is free, as does every Linux variant in existence. I haven’t bothered with VMware Workstation for eons. VirtualBox runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, though on Linux I run the built-in libvirt/kvm instead.
I think your experience with Windows 10 depends on the hardware you’re running it on. If you’re running it on hardware designed for Windows 10, it works fine. On some older hardware… not so much.
Yeah, really. *sigh* It really is more trouble than it’s worth! 😐 Even though I’ve pretty much tamed it and it mostly does what I want when I want, every now and then, it will do something stupid for no good reason. Like this. even M$ had iSCSI working in W7 (and W8 amazingly), now in W10 it’s suddenly crap! Can’t even find a 3rd party (free) iSCSI Initiator now. Wasn’t any point, it was fine. There are some commercial ones, but they are designed for heavy enterprise use & expensive. *shrug* I have other annoying issues also.
I was searching for anyone who had a fix for iSCSI (many have problems) and found this on one thread! LOL
Yep! Looks like an M$ fix to me!
Sorry badtux. Didn’t see your comment.
Yes, I know about VB & have used it. I use VMW for specific reasons and have several containers. I get cheap upgrades for my Linux version (on my CentOS server), but allowed the Win license to lapse as I hardly used it. I should have known better. *shrug* Both my tablet & *build from hell* are the latest systems, the tablet came with W10 Pro pre-installed. It installed on my slightly older Dell notebook (a Dell OEM W7 upgrade version from Dell for this notebook). They all have trouble with iSCSI. I rolled back the Notebook to Win 7, and have no problems at all. Many people are having trouble with W10 updated braking things that worked. And it seems the deployed LTSB edition licences are increasing rapidly. Not a surprise. I’ve lodged an issue report with M$, but haven’t had a reply. Also with Seagate, and at least they replied that they are looking into it as others have reported the issue. *shrug*
I should add that I did like VB as an open source visualization solution, & was OK on Win7. A few reasons I prefer VMW are: It’s a lot faster, VB doesn’t support booting Win guests using UEFI firmware (I tried it on my PC and it wouldn’t recognize the M.2 UEFI SSD’s), VMW has much better support for UEFI boot and GPT drives & hardware pass-through. VMW has much better graphics hardware support. And lastly, VB is now controlled by Oracle whom I trust less than M$ (though only marginally)! 😉 🙂
*sigh* I cannot believe I am thinking this… But I am considering using Win 8.1 Enterprise N on my new PC. 🙁 Only W8/8.1 & 10 are fully supported by the UEFI & hardware (drivers). Though, most manufacturers are increasing W7 support for drivers given the problems with W8/10, since W7 EOL is 2023 & will probably be 2025, in spite of M$ doing everything it can to kill it! Corporate’s are going back to it and that’s that! 😀
You should move this conversation to another post as comments are automatically closed on a post after 30 days and if you go beyond 55 comments, new comments don’t get displayed.