The Meme Hustler is the best thing I’ve read all year, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should. It’s a hatchet job on Tim O’Reilly, basically, but it’s a really good one, and it winds up being much more profound than that. Really, just go read it right now.
From the Department of Random Pontification:
What is it with the cancer of “we” which has spread through so-called ‘serious’ journalism in recent years?
It really irks me. It’s prevalent in the mainstream online and print media, and in most ‘serious’ media sites in various niches – entertainment, technology, whatever. People who write opinion pieces apparently all got a memo a decade or so back to talk about “we” all the time.
They don’t write “I think some people use Facebook too much”, they write “We all use Facebook too much”. They don’t write “Is your email box overflowing?”, they write “We all suffer from overflowing mailboxes”. And so on.
I guess the idea is to sound all inclusive and not as if you’re condescending to the reader, but for me at least it falls flat on its face, because half the time it feels like I’m being accused of something. I don’t use Facebook too much, thanks. Maybe you do. Maybe some other people do, I don’t know. But writing ‘we’ seems to be a presumption too far. Ditto with overflowing mailboxes, social anxiety or whatever else it is ‘we’ are apparently all suffering from this week, in the opinion of whatever editorial writer I happen to be reading at the time.
Opinion piece writers of the world, ‘we’ don’t all have your problems. If you want to write about your own problems, fine. If you want to state that other people have them, find some other people and define that set accurately. Don’t co-opt the entire rest of the world as fellow sufferers of whatever affliction you’re dealing with…
And now, for something completely different, may I present you with:
Mike Krahulik shouting my name while chasing a duck.
Kickstarter: sometimes, it’s money well spent.
As we work towards releasing the Fedora 19 Alpha (due in a couple of weeks), the Fedora 19 Test Days continue apace. Next up, tomorrow – 2013-04-04 – is printing Test Day. The goal is to check that the printing stack and user-facing tools are all in good working order for Fedora 19. Printing is something most of us still have to do from time to time, and it’s easy to test from a live image, so this is an ideal Test Day for most anyone to get involved in – the testing is easy and there’s no need to risk any permanent changes to your system. If all you have time to do is boot up a live image and test if your printer works, that’s great!
So please, check out the instructions on the Wiki page and help out tomorrow if you have a bit of spare time. You can join us in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC to get help or discuss any problems you find. If you’re not sure how to use IRC, we have some instructions here, or you can just click here to join through a Web front end.
OK, then, Mr. Smarty-Pants Forum Search, how do you suggest I search for ‘S3′?
It’s not the length of my search query, it’s what you do with it that counts…
As the last post hinted, it’s been hardware refresh time here at HA Towers lately.
I usually check on my hardware around this time of year, and this year I kinda remembered that my server box was getting a bit old.
I see that I blogged about the last upgrade too, so that was nearly three years ago. I was still using that vintage Antec Aria case and PSU from 2004. But most significantly, I didn’t upgrade the hard disk at that time; I used the one from the previous box. So now I look and it turns out that disk is…erm…a Seagate 7200.7 80GB. I have just checked my records, and I’m pretty sure I bought this disk on 2005-11-02. So it’s seven and a half years old, near enough. Yes, the box just had one of them – no redundancy. No, I didn’t have complete backups – I had my maildir, IRC logs, and WordPress data on scheduled backup, but the configurations of the VMs themselves and rather a lot of other stuff I’ve been running on my web server, not backed up at all. Eep.
Please, no-one remind me of the MTBF of ATA hard disks…
So anyway, it was clearly high time for a refresh. The other thing I decided to upgrade was my NAS. The old one – a D-Link DNS-323 – has served me well, but it’s pretty antiquated by modern NAS standards, and its NFS server isn’t reliable enough to be used. Modern NASes have all kinds of whizzy features (most of which I’m not going to use), but the most obvious difference is pure and simple speed: the DNS-323 manages a transfer speed of about 8-9MB/sec from a RAID-1 array with the wind behind it. The DNS-323 uses some kind of ancient ARM chipset. Modern SOHO NAS appliances use either much newer and faster ARM chipsets (at the low end) or Intel Atoms (at the higher end). I’ll tell you how fast my new one is later. (ooh! The suspense!)
So it was time for a bit of hardware shopping. The NAS was easy, after a bit of research at SmallNetBuilder and some price comparisons. I wanted an Atom-based box, for the big speed increase they provide. Various manufacturers are popular in the space, but the Thecus N5550 was available for $460 from NCIX, after the standard price-match-with-directcanada dodge. That’s significantly cheaper for a five-disk box than any of its competitors for a four-disk box. Bit of a no-brainer. Thecus’ UI is considered not as polished as its competitors, but the reviews indicated it works fine and performs well, and I don’t really care about shiny UIs; plus I could always just run FreeNAS or RHEL on it if the Thecus UI turned out to be really terrible. I matched it with five WD Red 2TB disks – the Reds are ‘NAS-optimized’ disks from WD. It was funny to note that they actually cost 50% more than the 2TB disks I bought for the DNS-323 in 2011 – hard disk prices sure have stopped going down.
I decided I was going to come up with a pretty nice server box this time – the last couple have been kind of bodged-together boxes (though they worked out remarkably reliably). It also has to fit in my little Ikea ‘server cabinet’. So eventually I plumped for:
Jonsbo V3+ mini-ITX case
Supermicro X9SCV-Q mini-ITX socket G2 motherboard
Intel Core i5-2450M CPU
Crucial 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3-1600 SODIMM RAM
2x Samsung 840 Pro 128GB SSD
Corsair CX430M 80+ Bronze module PSU
The CPU is a mobile one with a 35W TDP; I wanted to try and keep this box power-efficient. Deciding to go with a mobile CPU limits your choices in CPU and motherboard quite a lot, not many are readily available – that’s the only motherboard I could find that’s capable of taking a Socket G2 (mobile) CPU, and I got the CPU itself off eBay from a business that strips down returned laptops. But happily enough, it’s actually a pretty good motherboard. It’s meant for servers and has a bunch of neat server features. It’s also a UEFI board, and I did a native UEFI Fedora install. The CPU is capable (and about 3-4x faster than the X2-250).
Oodles of RAM is cheap these days, and should help prevent the web server going down under load, and I wanted two disks so I can do RAID-1 redundancy and SSDs because SSDs are so damn fast these days. The 840 Pro is the consensus SSD of choice among hardware tweakers right now, if you were interested! Don’t get the 840, though, it will have an awful lifespan.
Modular PSUs are a new hardware tweaker thing that’s happened since the last time I built a system. ‘Modular’ just means that most of the cables aren’t permanently wired into the PSU, as is traditional: the main ATX power cable is, but the others are all removable. There’s a bunch of sockets on the back of the PSU and you get a bunch of different cables in the box, and you just plug in the ones you need. This is great for this type of small build, as modern PSUs come with all sorts of auxiliary power connectors for exotic graphics cards and stuff; you don’t have to plug those in at all, so you save space and cable mess inside the box. All I had to plug in was two SATA power connectors, the rest I left out. 80 Plus certification is another relatively new thing, and simply about efficiency – there are several levels of certification which guarantee certain levels of power efficiency. Keeps heat output and electricity bills down, me likey.
The case is cheap, thin metal as you’d expect and doesn’t have any high-end bells and whistles like you get on nice Silverstone or Antec cases, but it’s the right size for me, it does the job, and it looks quite nice – very black monolith-y.
Aside from the hard disk mounting travails (see last post!), the build went pretty smoothly, except that I didn’t realize how you lock the CPU into the G2 socket; it doesn’t have a lever like desktop sockets, it has an actuator you have to turn with a flathead screwdriver.
Building the NAS box consisted of opening the hard disk bags and sliding them into the drive slots. This is the kind of reason I buy dedicated NAS boxes inside of trying to do custom PC builds!
I got the NAS last week, set it up and have had it transferring data all week; the CPU for the server box arrived today, so I built and installed that today. And now everything’s done and both little black monoliths are whirring away in my server cabinet, behaving themselves – so far – very nicely. I have rather a lot better data integrity guarantee on my servers now (whew – I’m also improving my backup plan using Duply, and when F19 goes stable, I’ll be able simply to take live snapshots of my VMs to back them up), and the performance improvements are awesome. The new NAS transfer rate? 70-90MB/sec; nearly 10x faster than the old one. That’s the kind of bump I like! I have it set up as a 6TB RAID-6 array (like RAID-5, but with two drives’ worth of parity data, so it can survive the loss of any two drives). I’ll use the old NAS’ disks as spares. Its NFS server seems reliable, it’s better at handling non-ASCII characters even across various client OSes and protocols than the DNS-323 – 世界の果てまで連れてって！ renders as 世界の果てまで連れてって！ on my Linux box with the share mounted via NFSv4, and on a Windows box with the share mounted via CIFS – and it can restrict access to shares in various ways, though the way it handles NFSv4, every NFS share is unavoidably accessible as r/w by anyone with access to the server, so I have to use CIFS shares if I want to do restricted access. The old VM host wasn’t slow exactly, but a faster CPU, 4x more RAM and bleeding-edge SSDs for storage sure make it faster. I could actually run all my testing VMs on that box and just access them via virt-manager from my desktop if I wanted; the performance seems almost identical between VMs running on the new server box accessed via ssh in virt-manager, and VMs running locally on my desktop.
So I’m happy with the new boxes! Out with the old:
and in with the new (server box on the left, NAS on the right):
Like, I suspect, many of you, I’ve done some pretty wacky stuff in my years of building my own systems, but today’s has to be near the top of the list:
Yes, it’s the string-mounted SSD.
In not-entirely-unrelated news, you may want to think twice before buying a Jonsbo V3+ case (AKA ‘DiyPC’ if you’re Newegg – they seem to be hiding the manufacturer for some reason), a Corsair PSU, and a 2.5″ SSD together, because someone in that chain doesn’t have the same idea as everyone else about which way around drive connectors are supposed to go. The SATA power connectors on the Corsair PSU are 90-degree angled. You mount 2.5″ drives in the V3+ case flush against the bottom. Unfortunately, things wind up such that the SATA power connectors don’t want to plug into the drives nicely such that the cable angles away inside the case, but the other way around, such that the cable wants to go right through the case and into the floor.
Whoops.
Hence, the string-mounted SSDs. They’ll go nicely with the one that’s zip-tied to the outside of the drive cage in my desktop. But hey, there’s no moving parts in an SSD, so it’s perfectly fine, even though it does look fracking ridiculous…
Edit: here is your terrible, terrible notice that there’ll be a bit of downtime on happyassassin.net shortly. The new box in question is my new server host box: I need to transfer all these server VMs over to it.
For anyone who wonders about the applicability of advanced math to everyday life:
There’s a good chance your data integrity relies on it.
When you think about RAID-5 at a superficial level, it kinda makes sense – ‘sure, you can take a 1/n capacity hit to ensure that you still have all your data if one drive dies, why not?’
Then you think about it a bit harder and think waiiiiiiiit, how does that work EXACTLY?
Then you go look up how RAID-6 works and bless the mathematics departments…
(note to mathematicians: this may well not be ‘advanced’ to you. It sure is to the rest of us, though.)
We have one of our biggest Test Day events coming up today/tomorrow, Thursday March 21st: the GNOME 3.8 Test Day. We’ll be testing GNOME 3.8 on a Fedora 19 base.
GNOME 3.8 is a great release, with a bunch of neat new features. I like the new method for opening the notification bar – it opens instantly as long as you hit the bottom of the screen hard enough, but doesn’t open at all if you just nudge it – and the improvements to GNOME’s ‘online accounts’ stuff are awesome: you can set up email and Owncloud accounts right in the GNOME control center, and they get picked up in your Evolution and Nautilus configuration. For the traditionalists among you, GNOME 3.8 comes with the new ‘Classic’ mode (though I have to admit, I didn’t test that at all!)
At the Test Day, we’ll be working to find any remaining bugs in the latest GNOME 3.8 packages. It’s easy to join in – we provide a live image for you to test with, and full testing instructions on the wiki page. You can join other testers, QA team members, and GNOME team members in #fedora-test-day on the Freenode IRC network to discuss your results. If you’re not sure how to use IRC, we have some instructions here, or you can just click here to join through a Web front end.
Fedora 19 is still pretty early in development, but we’ve done our best to build a live image that will work as smoothly as possible for the Test Day. So if you have some spare time on Thursday, please come along and help make sure GNOME 3.8 is as good as it can be!
Looking for a Google Reader replacement? Run your own web server? Stick a copy of tt-rss (which, presumably not coincidentally, is displaying its ‘high traffic emergency page’ at present) on it and be happy. It works nicely, is simple to set up, and has a rather good Android app in the Store (ad-supported and paid versions available). Don’t run your own web server? I can’t help you, but enjoy being at the mercy of frivolous giants. 