Computers - What have you tweaked today?

I have a Netgear N600 (WNDR3700v2) flashed withDD-WRT. This can act as a wireless client or wireless bridge. I have used it this way for a couple of years. That would leave you with two boxes and one access point (The Osprey). Well strictly speaking two as the Netgear is dual band so you could use the 5Ghz band for media devices.
 
New power supply in a Lenovo Desktop for a family friend.
Applied the upgrade to Winows 8.1 along with the other Windows updates and found the DVD drive disappeared. A registry hack later and it's back.

I'd planned on upgrading a 2007 era Dell Inspiron 530 from an Intel Celeron CPU to a Core2Quad, only to find that these PCs shipped with two motherboard flavours. The Foxcon G33M02 / G33M03. The only difference between these two boards is in CPU power regulation. This particular box has the G33M02 board which is missing a few vital capacitors needed to run a Core2Quad processor. So I'm looking to pick up a G33M03 for reasonable money. Chancers on eBay seem to want over fifty pounds for them!! Any ideas on where I can pick one up?

Then, finally for today, I added another USB ethernet interface to the firewall and swapped things around a bit now so the two on board gigabit interfaces are for the home LAN and my lab. The USB interfaces are handling the WAN connection and DMZ/web server connection - it' doesn't matter that they top out at 300 Mb/s when we're subject to single digit broadband speeds.
 
Been keeping my hand in after retiring last April from my job as a school ICT network Manager running a network of > 800 PCs & laptops.

Built a PC from scratch today for my grandson, i5, 16gb ram 240gb SSD & 1tb HDD. He bought a WIN 8 Pro upgrade licence so we had to install Win7 64bit, then download 64 bit Win8 Pro from Microsoft, apply 8.0 service before downloading & applying Win 8.1 Pro upgrade plus service. Took most of the day but he went home a happy lad.

A few days ago I added a second Xeon processor to my DELL Precision T5400 and upgraded the memory from 8gb to 24gb & installed an SSD, then replaced Win7 Home with Win7 Pro to provide > 8gb memory support. It flies now!
 
My boot drive (SSD) on my Win 8.1 desktop was getting full and flagged as red (<9GB left) so I:

1. Deleted a bunch of LR backups, >8GB
2. Moved my iTunes backup folder to a different drive using mklink (symbolic link), 4GB
3. Moved my Windows/Installer folder to a different drive using mklink, >7GB
4. Got rid of all the trash on my desktop
5. Ran disk cleanup. including cleaning up system files
6. Moved my page file to a different drive, 5GB

I ended up recovering over 30GB of space on my SSD :)
 
What's a good result for broadband downloads/uploads these days? I jump around from 20 to 34 Mbps for downloads, but pretty steady at 3.2 Mbps for uploads.

My provider claims my plan is "up to" 50 Mbps for downloads, but I've never seen that number reached.
 
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There's many variables involved bob, the 'up to 50' part will be the maximum throughput of your circuit not taking into account your distance from the cabinet (FTTC), contention on service (likely to be around 1:20 or more), and actual throughput possible on the router/firewall (enabling DPI/IPS can half the maximum throughput of your router although this is mainly SMB/enterprise appliances this applies to).

FTTC would normally be up to 38Mbps or up to 76Mbps. FTTP has at least 12 options for speed as its really dictated by the carrier and to be honest I know little about cable as Cornwall has no cable options, but I suspect you are referring to a cable connection?

For reference, I've got 'up to 76' and frequently see around 45mbps downstream with around 11mbps upstream.
 
broc said:
A few days ago I added a second Xeon processor to my DELL Precision T5400 and upgraded the memory from 8gb to 24gb & installed an SSD, then replaced Win7 Home with Win7 Pro to provide > 8gb memory support. It flies now!
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I have a couple of those, both with dual Xeons and 20GB RAM, despite their relative age nowadays they're sill really good IMO. Currently one is an ESXi host and the other an 2012R2 + Hyper V server.
 
Neilc28 said:
There's many variables involved bob, the 'up to 50' part will be the maximum throughput of your circuit not taking into account your distance from the cabinet (FTTC), contention on service (likely to be around 1:20 or more), and actual throughput possible on the router/firewall (enabling DPI/IPS can half the maximum throughput of your router although this is mainly SMB/enterprise appliances this applies to).

FTTC would normally be up to 38Mbps or up to 76Mbps. FTTP has at least 12 options for speed as its really dictated by the carrier and to be honest I know little about cable as Cornwall has no cable options, but I suspect you are referring to a cable connection?

For reference, I've got 'up to 76' and frequently see around 45mbps downstream with around 11mbps upstream.
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Thank Neil. Yes, I have a cable connection.
 
Success! Relief!
So I got one of them Amazon Fire TVs, plugged it in. Signed up for a smartDNS. Entered the DNS number into the Fire TV. Set my Amazon account to a UK address and bingo! We have UK TV and films in English in Germany. Which is otherwise blocked.

This is even better and cheaper than when we fixed up a Sky satellite dish years ago. Then had to ditch a while back, when they focused the satellite signals away from southern Germany.

On top of all that I can now view my Flickr and Picasa pictures on the telly. As well as YouTube. Bril!
 
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ianp5a said:
Success! Relief!
So I got one of them Amazon Fire TVs, plugged it in. Signed up for a smartDNS. Entered the DNS number into the Fire TV. Set my Amazon account to a UK address and bingo! We have UK TV and films in English in Germany. Which is otherwise blocked. We even get the BBC iPlayer which I could never use before. Not sure how to use it now though.
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You want to be careful about admitting to using copyright material outside the terms of the licence, particularly on a photography forum ;) Plenty of people that are sensitive about copyright here!
 
i think thats probably more breaking the end user agreement rather than copyright to be fair. i mean they're still paying for the content just not the correct content for their geographical area.

would still probably get the service terminated if ever found out.
 
Good point. Although the web is rife with discussions on this subject. As it was with getting SKY abroad years before. I doubt if anyone here is in favour of region coding of DVDs that you have paid for but can't watch. Even though the film may have been released 10 or 20 years before.
 
Well getting back on topic, lots done work wise including first attempt at WDS multicast transmission. Sadly aborted as the system partitions on the target machines were too small to cache the installation image and host the installation. I will either have to reduce the size of the installation image or initially make the target partition larger, shrinking it down after installation.

On the home front I have the server and switch in a cabinet. I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of appropriate length power and network cables.
 
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Don't talk to me about LDAP servers. Must be about 10 hours so far.... (I have it working, just not with the systems I want)
 
Eek. I looked at setting up the home server with LDAP but cried off until I've got it working with VMs in a lab.

Trying to get my linux boxen to automatically mount and kinit user-specific kerberised NFS shares this morning.
 
i just finished stripping that horrid flakey iCloud out of my systems. OneDrive has taken over.

i just had to create a little W7 VM to download the content onto my 2003 server (downloads to the VM through OD software then an hourly batch to the server as neither 2003 or network drives are supported).
 
afasoas said:
Eek. I looked at setting up the home server with LDAP but cried off until I've got it working with VMs in a lab.
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This is for a secure server in work. We have various bits of software that need authentication and I've got bored of sorting each one out individually, so a local LDAP server seemed like a good idea on Thursday afternoon.... I have logins working and twiki authenticating against it - but not mapping to twiki users properly yet. Gerrit is next after that....

I'm not sure what benefit it would bring to a home network environment - unless you want to centralise login resources - and I'm not sure what the benefit of that is unless you have a set of people you want to keep information away from (I run all of my shares with world read/write access and only allow people I trust onto my network...)
 
neil_g said:
Plugged in and registered (that's about all you need to do) a Chromecast.

Impressed for a £30 tiny device.
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You wait until you find out its weaknesses (i.e., USB powered wifi device hung off the back of the TV).
 
After a nightmare three days I finally have a new PC ready for my camper van. It's been one of those builds where if it can go wrong it will.

I already had a low power i3 system working in my camper running Win 7 32bit but wanted something more powerful so I can edit easily in the van and we can use our Steam account for gaming. Settled on an i5 4690t with an Asus Z97 mini itx board and 8gb of ram. The Asus board has a M.2 SSD slot so added a 240gb M.2 drive and a WD Black 750gb. This was all to fit into an Antec ISK 110.

I've honestly never had a build with so many issues but it's all sorted now and runs brilliantly. The M.2 drive is ballistic - much faster than any SSD I've ever used.

I've not tried Photoshop or Lightroom yet, but did decide to see if it will run games. After a little tweaking it will even play GTA 4 in HD so very happy.

Just waiting now for my new WiFi antenna's and 12v router to turn up.
 
Well quite a bit of tweaking done thus far this weekend.

Plex server installed (easy). It's hosted on my home server within a libvirt/KVM/QEMU virtual machine (reasonably easy). It accesses media via Kerberised NFS shares. So today I've written rc.local and crontab scripts for the Plex user to automatically grab and renew Kerberos credentials (Again, reasonably easy). I've added libvirt-bin to the default rc.d (sysinit) run levels and made set the Plex virtual machine to auto start.

From what I understand, any running guest virtual machines are supposed to be gracefully shut down when libvirt-bin is stopped, but it just hangs around until the Guest OS is shutdown manually. So my next job is to write a pre-shut down script that will shut-down the guest OS before the host stops libvirt-bin during shutdown.

Once I have that done, I might get around to configuring the switch I've installed for my lab and then decide on a hyperviser for the new server.
 
Fitted a USB3 card and front panel to my Core 2 Quad PC; now have 4 USB3 ports - 2 at back and 2 at front - speeds way up on file transfer!

Also started the long process of wiping some HDDs (using the format command) to ensure that all private data remains well and truly private.

And learning about the joys of Recuva after accidentally performing a quick format on a 4TB HDD!

Apart from that, not a bad week!
 
After a week of running faultlessly, the Plex server decided it didn't want to do NFS properly. I could list the contents of the mounted shares, but not the contents of any files. I could still delete files, but not create them. And even more oddly, out of the three mounted NFS shares, one still worked perfectly even though the configuration was identical.

Anyway, after rebuilding the Plex server from scratch and perfectly reproducing the problem, I fixed it on a hunch by changing the mount type from nfs to nfs4. It looks for some reason like the Plex server was defaulting to nfs3 - which won't work because I haven't enabled statd. I haven't seen that behaviour on any of the other mint/ubuntu boxen, so I'm figuring it something to do with the Plex server being virtualised (using kvm/libvirt) and accessing shares from it's own NFS host.

I did try using virtio/virtfs to give the Plex server direct access to the shares on the host, but that doesn't play nice with ZFS.
 
Dirty on account of choosing Debian or using sFTP?

I took the path of least resistance (so I thought) using Ubuntu for the home server. It's just one big problem! :)
Figuring Debian might underpin my next project.
 
DaveS2 said:
Just doubled the amount of RAM in my i7 based PC, from 6Gb to 12Gb, which has speeded things up nicely. :)

I do a bit of HD video editing, so the extra RAM will be helpful.

Dave
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DaveS2 said:
Having seen the advantage from doing the above, I have decided to take it a step further, and have ordered a SSD to replace the existing HDD.

Unlike even just a couple of years ago, when the cost of high capacity SSDs outweighed the advantages, the prices have now come down to sensible levels.

Dave
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Update:

Wow!!, with the HDD now replaced with an SSD, it has very significantly speeded things up. :)

The time taken to boot-up has been reduced by well over 50%, and accessing applications is really 'snappy'.

All-in-all, a really worthwhile upgrade. :)

Dave
 
Curious. sFTP is sFTP? Seems a bit strange that the underlying OS should have any bearing on it.

My own tweaks:
1. libvirt-bin's upstart script on home server now shuts downs VMs on reboot or when the service is manually stopped. It also has a reasonable time out for the guest OS to shutdown. Thank's Ubuntu for that one. (..other distro's do it differently)
2. Home server now shuts down gracefully when running on batteries.

Work tweaks:
1. Randomly rebooting workstation has had a new PSU and I've got a powershell script running to check it's up time every ten minutes. Stable so far.
2. Latest adobe flash update rolled out via GPO

It's all very very exciting.
 
afasoas said:
Curious. sFTP is sFTP? Seems a bit strange that the underlying OS should have any bearing on it.
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youre telling me. but apparently they couldnt get their (linux based) system connected to whichever Windows SFTP server app we tried. However setting up a linux based SFTP at our end works. im wondering if it was different underlying SSH protocols/versions or something daft.
 
neil_g said:
youre telling me. but apparently they couldnt get their (linux based) system connected to whichever Windows SFTP server app we tried. However setting up a linux based SFTP at our end works. im wondering if it was different underlying SSH protocols/versions or something daft.
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It still surprises me, but the issues I've had in the past to get various sftp servers/client to play nicely. It can be a real nightmare.
 
we suspect it was do to with SSH version but the vendor is confirming/denying nothing. coincidentally they found a fix for a future release in a few months pretty sharpish once we gave them some logs which had sporadic SSH errors.
 
just built myself this
Phanteks Enthoo case
Mpower z97
i7 4790k cpu @4 gh
16 gig ram
msi 7800 graphics card from my old one
Samsung ssd for the operating system and Photoshop and two WD hard drives raided for storage
got fed up with waiting for my old one to do something.View attachment 29264 View attachment 29265
 
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Some much needed spring cleaning of my Synology NAS drive. Removed Cloudstation app that took me down from 86% to 30% full!
 
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