Friday, March 31, 2017

I think I'm finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel regarding my hardware setup.

• Discussions with the vendor on the PC I ordered. Went to their web site, got a pretty good configuration for 2100euros, now want me to pay 2930 for the same thing. It looks like they goofed up with their pricing of some Xeon CPUs. Checked EU law, as long as they did not charge me yet, they don't have to honor the advertised price. They are supposed to fix it, of course, but how do you prove it's false advertising and not a honest mistake?
• Since Shuttle has proven relatively reliably recently, I decided to connect it to a larger disk than the 2'5 external portable disk it's currently running on. Connected it to the TerraMaster bay. It was formerly used to backup the Synology, but since that way of doing backups kills the machine's I/O performance, I decided to change tactics.
• Booting from the TerraMaster array was a bit challenging. Installation always proceeds normally, but when it comes time to reboot, I get a black screen, not even the Fedora boot menu. Several attempts later, it finally worked. Not sure what changed, except that I had physically disconnected the other disk, changed USB ports, and fiddled with BIOS settings.
• Started copying VMs over. Having 10TB online means I can have all my pet VMs in one place. The copy speed is a bit disappointing, though. I'm hovering at around 16MB/s. When I suspend a copy, I see the kernel taking one full CPU for a while, and disk transfer rate remains high, for quite a while. So a large number of pending writes not completed. Hmmm. Ooops, the USB port is apparently USB2 and not USB3. Found a USB3 port that works. And lo, now I get 150MB/s reads with hdparm -t /dev/sdb4. Mucho better. Copying from Muse at 35MB/s, which is probably the peak read speed of Muse.
• Observed that some boots of the machines are bad, seen both with Muse or Shuttle. Symptoms are: high CPU load, system is highly unresponsive. Rebooting fixes it. No time to investigate, but I have a feeling something bad is still lurking.
• Still some issues with VNC access. One Muse, I still have to go to dconf-editor and specify that I want only the local Ethernet port in org/gnome/desktop/remote-access/network-interface.
• My DNS / DHCP setup seems to work fine, but I have not entirely repaired my Jenkins yet.

Otherwise, got some e-mail exchanges regarding documentation for Bridging. Apparently, a good resource is AdamW's blog article. I'll try that next.

So this was overall a week with practically no code, which is quite frustrating. Hopefully I can catch up a bit later.