Comments on: Outer Bands

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 14:21:48 +0000

The carrier carries an air wing of two FA-18 squadrons, while Osan AB has a wing with an F-16 squadron and an A-10 squadron and Kunsan AB as a wing of two F-16 squadrons. There is more support from Yokota, Misawa, and Kadena. Osan also has a U-2 squadron and everyone except Kunsan should still have elements of my old outfit. They have deployed B-1s to Korea, but that may have only been for a joint training exercise.

We have a lot of people who rotate to and from Osan at Eglin.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 00:43:25 +0000

Yeah. I use CentOS 7 on my server & ZFS when i had a RAID there. No need for RAID on that now. My 2 NAS’s have been very good. Happy with their h/w & s/w. They do what the manufacturers said & what i got them for. I wish everything was that way. Would make life a lot easier.

Now I have a problem suddenly on my Workstation. Had a couple BSOD “clock_watchdog_timeout” crashes. Being Windoze crappy error reporting, I tracked the actual error to “WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR (124)” bugcheck. “This bug check indicates that a fatal hardware error has occurred. This bug check uses the error data that is provided by the Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA).” This is usually a hardware fault (CPU or MoBo) or it can be caused by some BIOS update s/w like Gigabyte @BIOS or Asus AI-Suite, or s/w that interacts w/ & BIOS but I haven’t used those since I built the system. Still looking into it. I do have a couple monitor/management s/w running in background that can modify BIOS on the fly (CPU Management mostly, but also fan’s), like the Corsair LINK s/w, which is known to have been a problem on older versions. But it’s been good for a year. *shrug*

This only happens on W10 so far. Though I don’t use W7 or CentOS a lot these days. I’ll reinstall W10. Been wanting a clean reinstall anyway. But I have a lot of s/w to reinstall, some will be a PITA to do. Oh well…

By: Badtux

Badtux — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 01:22:04 +0000

My NAS is just running straight Centos 7 combined with ZFS On Linux. I’ve tried all the pre-canned software and don’t like any of it, none of it is flexible enough for me.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 17:32:53 +0000

Seems to be the thing to make silly decisions in the military. Like our new Sub’s. *shrug* What’s new?

It’s always good to get some great deals. I’ve been very lucky. I know I’ve saved over $10k the past decade alone. The little Seagate 4-bay NAD + 4x 5 TB NAS HDD’s for about AU$1,500 was a steal. I really wanted the 6-bay, but they only had 10 & sold out by the time I was ready to order. Was on special too for only $180 more. Had a faster controller & double the RAM. Oh well. I’m pretty happy with this. 😀 I still have the Enterprise Buffalo NAS, but it’s mainly used for backups from this NAS & my systems. Way overkill for that! Especially since I upgraded the 12 SAS HDD’s to the HGST Ultrastar 7K600 (HUS726060AL4211) 6TB drives when I built this PC. I sold the 10 2TB Ultrastar’s that were in it on eBay. Did fairly well actually. 🙂

Only network gear I got was a 4-port gbit PCI-E card (same as in my server) & fast 8-port switch with a 10Gb SFP+ FO module. So I only have a single cable to run to my *office* (the spare bedroom) where my main switch/router/server NAS etc are. Even though this MoBo has 2 e’net ports, they are different & can’t be teamed (intel & a crappy expensive Killer). MoBo makers are morons! Oh, I did add a PCIe card to the Buffalo (has 2 PCIe slots) that supports 2x 4-lane NVMe SSD’s (supported by the controller & s/w on the Buffalo of course). I had planned to move the 2x 512 GB 950 Pro drives from the PC to that as a fast cache & get a pair of 960 Pro 1 TB SSD’s for this workstation. But I’m in no hurry now. Maybe the 970 Pro 2 TB will be available for the price of a 1TB by the time I am! 😆 The 960 PRO 1 TB costs the same now as the 950 PRO 512 GB did when I got them Dec. 2015 (AU$550). the 2TB is about $1,200! Though, the little Segate NAS is getting full… just over 9 TB already. But a lot of that was data I’d archived onto DLT & DVD/BR’s over the years & 2D/3D gfx files I’ve been working on which can get quite large. It has just over 14 TB available, so not a crisis yet. 😉 It’s just convenient, why I got it.

Best made plans… 😉

By: Badtux

Badtux — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 06:38:44 +0000

A Nimitz class carrier carries as many aircraft as will fit at our airbases in Korea, which are shared with the South Korean air force and thus their full capacity is not available to us. So if you expect war with North Korea, having a Nimitz in the area would definitely be handy. Japan is really too far away for fighter-bombers from Japan to attack North Korea. Our airbase in northern Japan was there to defend Japan against the Soviets, not to deal with North Korea. Japan could possibly be used to base B-1 or B-52 bombers in the event of war (Okinawa anyhow), but we’d probably keep flying them out of Guam and refueling them out of Okinawa. We’ve flown B-52’s out of Okinawa before, but the Japanese got annoyed when we blew up a huge hole in their island when one of our B-52’s crashed with a full bomb load, so we’ve kept them out of there since. And of course Guam is the only airbase we have in the area that has the special facilities needed for the B-2 bomber…

All of which will hopefully remain theoretical.

Flying jump jets off the QE is going to be so bloody expensive. They could have put catapults on the thing for the price difference between F-18 Super Hornets and F-35B’s, and the bugs will haul a larger load further too. It’s not as if the UK is going to go charging into contested airspace anytime soon. That’s what the US exists for…

Regarding builds, I recently made some eBay scores to upgrade my old NAS system at home: Matched Pair Intel Xeon X5675 3.06GHz 12M Cache Hex Core Processor, and 48 gb of additional RAM. Total cost was $260. *WAY* cheaper than buying a new machine, and plenty of horsepower for a NAS / virtualization server, now that I’m up to 68gb of memory. Who needs more than 12 cores / 24 threads for a home NAS anyhow? 🙂 I also scored a Dell PowerConnect 5524P POE 24 port Gigabit Managed Layer 3 Switch 2 SFP+ ports to take the place of both my POE switch and my 10gbit switch (since I have only two machines with 10gbit Ethernet — the NAS, and my gaming machine). I’m now using 1/3rd the power for my switches that I was using before — the 24-port 10gbit switch uses 120 watts all by itself! I still have the 10gbit switch in the rack though in case I ever need it again, though. Unplugged, of course!

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 02:31:07 +0000

The Russians looked at the photo gallery and figured out that the plans they hacked from BAE are worthless because they are for the the vessel that was proposed, not the one that was built. It will be a while before the F-35s for carriers are available so there’s no rush. I’m happy that France and Britain have carriers and can reduce the burden on the US carriers that Trump seems to want to send everywhere. What was the point of sending a carrier to the waters off of Korea? The Japanese and Koreans supply the US with bases, so the point escapes me.

I keep hearing clowns in Congress extolling the virtues of the ‘free market’. When you can only get a service or product from one vendor, there is no market.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Mon, 26 Jun 2017 21:35:03 +0000

Yeah… Same old… *shrug* Things rarely change.

So, the HMS Queen Elizabeth is beginning sea trials. Will be interesting. I’m amazed they got her out of the dock! It was a tight fit. 😆

Story & photo’s:

HMS Queen Elizabeth squeezes out of dockyard for the first time – and Russian spies are watching

I had to laugh when I read they are worried about Russian spy ships, sub’s & aircraft… But are only sending 1 frigate for the trials! Obviously, they can’t be too worried. Especially as they’ve posted plenty of photo’s of the construction. Like these:

HMS Queen Elizabeth – onboard the Royal Navy’s new warship, in pictures

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 26 Jun 2017 15:20:25 +0000

The telecoms don’t want to ‘compete’ with the government, but they don’t want provide the service because it would increase their costs… except, fiber requires less maintenance than coax. The telecoms want the profit and high share prices, and they can’t figure out that giving people what they want and need at a decent price guarantees both for decades. They are throwing away the future of their companies and the country to increase profits in the next quarter.

The Internet has become a utility, and utilities tend to be cheaper when they are owned and operated by local governments. The reason is the the ‘customers’ are the owners and can ‘fire’ management. Public/Private Partnerships all follow the same model – the Public gets the costs and the Private gets the profits.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Mon, 26 Jun 2017 08:06:56 +0000

Oh yes! Been through all that & more! I don’t miss any of it. Though, it does make for a good laugh over a beer with m8’s! 😉 😆

I read an interesting post in the Bitsum blog you might find interesting. 🙂 Something you’ve spoken about a few times. 😉 It’s a sobering read.

Why we should *demand* Fiber-To-The-X (Home, Premises)

We should do the same! In fact, we should demand the politicians pay back every $ of the NBN they screwed up & we do it properly!

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 25 Jun 2017 15:31:20 +0000

Support is so much fun 😉 Explaining why keeping floppies on a magnetic copy holder is a bad idea to new users. Then there were the 3½ diskettes that would get scrambled if they were near your garage door remote. There will always be people who can’t understand why putting a cellphone in rice or the oven of a gas stove will dry it out, but putting in a microwave will fry it [and the microwave]. These people and Windows have supported computer consultants for decades.

The joys of batch processing. The good old days when you couldn’t get any computer time at the end of months, quarters, and the business year because Finance was running its reporting. Your batch processing will at least produce something that won’t just get filed away after being glanced at once, and then shredded after the tax agency retention period has passed.

Keeping active when you don’t feel 100% isn’t easy, but it is necessary.