Computers - What have you tweaked today?

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afasoas

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I couldn't find an existing thread for this, so I thought I would start one.

I've just fettled my desktop, a Lenovo K430. Looks like it wasn't assembled with much attention to detail, the cabling was like spaghetti. Now that the space behind the air intake fan isn't fouled up by any cables, it's running 5-10 degrees cooler.

What have you fettled today?
 
I've spent the weekend changing my server operating system from FreeBSD to Ubuntu (yes, I know what I said about Ubuntu...). I figured ZFS was stable enough under Linux to move to it. Currently setting up a mail relay on it for the house....
 
Well not today but over the last few days I've changed my Duo Core machine used for surfing into a Quad core by adding a £10.00 S/H Quad core from ebay - and it works fine and is a bit faster.

And built an i3 pc from parts bought S/H on here and some bits I had over - and it runs very fast.

So altogether a productive few hours.
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arad85 said:
None of mine needs tweaking either....
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Technically, neither did mine! :)

arad85 said:
I've spent the weekend changing my server operating system from FreeBSD to Ubuntu (yes, I know what I said about Ubuntu...). I figured ZFS was stable enough under Linux to move to it. Currently setting up a mail relay on it for the house....
Click to expand...

Ahh interesting. I'll be trying out a Linux/ZFS combo shortly.
I've still not procured disks for my new server, but I've got a small SSD for the OS and one hard disk, so figured I'd start toying around. Can you have a zpool with one vdev?
 
afasoas said:
Can you have a zpool with one vdev?
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Yes :) But if you are playing, you can even make partitions or files into vdevs. ZFS is the dogs danglies as far as filesystems go....
 
Wouldn't say it was tweaking, but troubleshooting a Vigor 2860, quite possibly the worst Draytek I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with :(
 
Two weeks ago I replaced the bastardised version of Android on my old nook tablet with Cyanogen mod.
Last weekend I replaced the Pentium CPU in my wife's computer with a core2duo and upgraded it from XP to Windows 8.1.
This weekend on my own desktop I installed a SSD for the OS drive, replaced the 8 year old air cooler which had been used in the previous 3 previous rebuilds with a sealed liquid cooler and reinstalled the lot into a new case.
 
Neilc28 said:
Wouldn't say it was tweaking, but troubleshooting a Vigor 2860, quite possibly the worst Draytek I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with :(
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I think we have a couple of those at work gathering dust. The trouble they caused are entering into folklore.


I installed ubuntu onto my home server last night. Suffice to say, it's not working. I mostly just get a black screen. Occasionally I get the GRUB menu and a black screen. I've tried "nosplash" and "nomodeset" boot options to no avail. I'll iterate through some of the other options later on.

A mini-ITX dual NIC atom MoBo complete with ram and a PicoPSU arrived today. That's hopefully going to become a pfSense firewall when I find a suitable case and power brick.
 
I don't tweak pooters much these days. However, I recently bought one of those 'orrible netbooks loaded with Windows 7 Starter - that had slowed almost to a halt. My last netbook was like that, but ran a treat with extra memory, and an installation of Ubuntu. Well it did until it was thrown at me. This one though - needs deep surgery in order to upgrade the memory. So I just went for software only upgrade. I installed Lubuntu (plus Gimp of course). Now its perfectly useable, a nice little netbook for browsing Flickr and TP.
 
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afasoas said:
I installed ubuntu onto my home server last night. Suffice to say, it's not working. I mostly just get a black screen. Occasionally I get the GRUB menu and a black screen. I've tried "nosplash" and "nomodeset" boot options to no avail. I'll iterate through some of the other options later on.
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What graphics card?
 
I opened the lid and all worked immediately. :)
 
I'm guessing you've Google-d it. This throws up something from 4 years ago: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1420578

I only use Nvidia cards under Linux (well, OK, my HTPC uses a Haswell onboard, but Intel have been a bit more proactive of late). I'd drop a cheap Nvidia card in somewhere. That'll probably be fine ;)

EDIT ahahah... g o o g l e d (without spaces) -> googled
 
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Hi Andy,
I seemed to have fixed the issue with the server. I'm not sure how, but resetting BIOS to defaults and then reconfiguring seemes to have resolved it.

Fresh tweaking today with the firewall. It's in a temporary mATX case until I can find a mini ITX one suitable. Fingers crossed I'll have pfSense installed on it soon.
 
I love pfSense. Takes a while to get your head around it, but very worthwhile. I would never go back to a router solution (I run 2 permanent VPNs, a road warrior VPN, local DNS, punchthrough to modems plus a host of other "useful" things).
 
Not tweaking as such,
my water pump failed on wednesday, so i took the opportunity to flush through my rad's and replace all my tubing and while I was at it I have added an inline coolant temp sensor. just going through the last water flush now then refill with coolant before I test the temps.
 
Installed and configured voice attack for Elite Dangerous. Muahhahhahaa.... Love this game.
 
Installing an updated library as Intel drivers tear on video playback under Ubuntu 14.04 (which was last week's upgrade) and getting chrome to boot nicely from within xbmc

Always something to do.... :D
 
Upgraded to SQL Server 2014, Set up data sync with a remote SQL Server, hacked bad code a remote developer send me for a project to make it work...Finally can do my part now...
 
At work I've been fiddling with CruiseControl.NET/NAnt so that builds can be profiled (performance wise) at the click of a button.

At home, I've finally installed disks into the server. Half configured Zentyal (...I'm mildly impressed so far, although a few tweaks have been needed) and after jumping over a few hurdles, installed ubuntu-zfs.
 
Quite a lot of fettling going on here just now.

I ditched Zentyal because it didn't play that nicely with ZFS and whilst I could hack around it, it wasn't worth the trouble. I've created zpools and I've copied most of my data over to them. All that remains is to sort out permissions so that I can actually access them.

I've also put the "firewall" inside a tiny ITX case and installed a 50mm fan. Unfortunately the fan is noisier than expected, so I'm figuring I either have to find some way of regulating it or set it up in the garage. I'm not planning on using it until there's some ethernet connecting the garage/lounge/study which is at least a couple of weeks away. The firewall itself is a motherboard embedded Intel Atom processor which in theory could just be passively cooled, but I'm much happier blowing some air through the case.

Oh and a little power meter arrived today so I've started working out the energy requirements of various bits of kit. The all singing/dancing desktop seems to average 0.08 kWh 's under low load/idling conditions and the Syno NAS box so far 0.03, not yet having been left alone long enough for it's disks to go into stand-by. I'll be intrigued as to what the server works out at in comparison.
 
Started installing Windows 10 on my work laptop. It's taking a while for an in-place upgrade...
 
Fresh install yesterday afternoon took me just under 8mins, backing up my data was another story :(
 
Double back up of Macericks ready to install Yosemite as a fresh install.
 
Writing some code for work. And on my day off too - simply because it is interesting(!)
 
Spent the last few days trying to fix problems with my wordpress blog as it kept crashing after 18 month working fine. It looks like 1GB of ram is not really enough so decided to move my blog from Tagadab to Linode as they do 2GB ram for the same price Tagadab charge for 1GB and they do SSD hosting as standard so a no brainer really. Took me a while to remember how to set up wordpress and how to import my sql database from my backup as never done a wordpress restore before, but my blog now seems to work ok on 2GB ram without crashing (yet!). I have set up the free pingdom uptime testing (1 test per minute) so get an alert if the blog goes down.
 
I don't tweak things any more, because after 20 years in the IT game, I'm all about things that work with the minimum effort from me.

That said, I did have a satisfying hour or so recently when I disassembled my tower PC - not to tweak it, but to clean all the fans and make it all neat and tidy. I've done a fair bit of cable installation in my time so neat wiring is a thing of mine. I have a spacious CoolerMaster case which is designed for tool-free opening, and all the dust filters pop out easily, so cleaning up all the dust-bunnies and getting the fluff off the fan blades was satisfying rather than annoying.

It wasn't noisy before but it's really quiet now :) And it's really clean inside, too!
 
I can't be arsed with tweaking these days, although I used to be a hardcore overclocker. I've barely touched my rig since it was build apart from adding another SSD every now and then (think it's 4 now?). I5 2500, 16GB ram, 2x R9 280x. Monsters it's way through anything still, coding, gaming, media. Mature technology is wonderful :)

I did spend an aborted hour trying to get my NAS to act as a print server for my cheap Canon laser printer, but gave up in the end. Maybe another day!
 
Configuring the new server.

Installed slapd, samba and configured samba to act as a classic domain controller using the ldap back end. Attempted to add a Windows VM to the domain and it failed because it couldn't find the domain controller. I suspect something missing from DNS/DHCP and figured I felt like a break from samba anyway.

So I installed bind9. Got that working fairly wonderfully. Then isc-dhcp-server (dhcpd3) and that's mostly working fine to, complete with DNS updates.

I haven't got back to sorting out Samba yet, as I'm still investigating an issue with the dhcp server. For some reason it's only assigning reserved IP addresses to about a third of the hosts that have reservations, and I can't quite fathom why. I know it's not essential, but I find that partially broken nature of it infuriating and there's no reason (that I know of) why it shouldn't just work.
 
Been playing with Porteus linux recently: incredibly small and fast, the XFCE version installs from CD on a conventional HDD in under 5min. Functionality is a bit iffy, with issues over audio and updates, though that could be down to my lack of experience and understanding how this particular distro works.
 
Windows 10 build 9879 went on today without crashing my PC (unlike last week)...
 
This week I have ...

Installed ESXi 5.5u2
Set up VMs of W7 home basic, W7 Ultimate N and Debian
Configured exim on the Debian VM as a local mail relay punting things on to my ISP's smarthost, set up Dovecot as an IMAP server and uploaded the entire contents of the Maildirs from the almost dead SD card pulled out of my Pi, bunged Apache on and set up mediawiki, wordpress and roundcube (on first viewing I like this)

Now looking to add more NICs so I can run a pfSense VM to replace my elderly hardware firewall, as that only has 10Mbps ports on it so throttles FTTC.

Got an IPv6 /48 from my ISP.

Oh, and I bought a cheap "cable" router with wifi to provide an RFC1918 subnet off my LAN, so the Sky box, freesat recorder, BD player and two TVs no longer use up real IPv4 addresses from my /28 and people visiting me and connecting their laptops etc to my wifi no longer get a real IPv4 address with no firewalling and no NAT hide behind to protect their device from external attack.

At work, I even managed to do some programming.
 
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