SoManyMiles-SoLittleTime

WIFI dead zones. Installed eero. No more dead zones. Wife happy...I'm happy.

KRSW

Don't laugh too hard, but I have a 3Com 3C905 10/100 NIC in one of the office routers. I believe it dates back to 1996 and replaced a circa-2012 NIC which failed. Kind of wild to think it is older than some of our new hires and is still working beautifully. Our internet connection is ~500Mbps, BUT I've never seen us even come close to 100Mbps, so no reason to mess with it for now.


Does learning how to operate this beast count as techy stuff?


In normal times I'm almost never home, so being 'grounded' due to COVID and the restrictions was getting to me. I've been driving past this airport on the way to the office and have been jealously watching the planes flying around. Screw lay-flat seats, lounges, and points -- at this time I'd be happy to be in anything airborne, even a hot air balloon. I'm currently studying the ground portion now, hoping to get the Written/Knowlege test done by month-end. Shooting to have the PPL sometime in the fall, but it's more important for me to truly understand the concepts than just passing the test. If everything goes to plan I'll be able to visit my relatives for the holidays without the pitfalls of airline travel today.

bchandler02

Not sure where it'd fit, but I would be interested in a separate thread just to document your journey. I've always been curious about this.

gfunkdave

I went to flying camp when I was a kid, and flew with a friend from Chicago to Champaign several years ago after he got his license. It's a lot of fun but flying those little planes is also a lot of work! You've got to constantly scan around for traffic, adjust course as the wind continually blows you off course, check a rotating range of instruments...it's really tiring! But fun.

KRSW

I'm normally a rather private person, but I do feel strongly that anyone with even the slightest hint of wanting to fly should at least try a discovery flight. If you can think of the right place to post it, I'll do it.

There isn't a better time than now to learn how to fly. The USA has the lowest costs to learn how to fly compared to other countries, so much that Florida alone accounts for 20%+ of the *world's* flight training. That doesn't include AZ/NV/TX/CA, which also have numerous flight schools. These schools have many (mostly?) foreign students. Due to COVID, these schools/CFIs are desperate for business. Similarly, AVGAS prices are at an all-time low. There's a ton of availability for rental aircraft. Honestly, there hasn't been a better time to do this.

A LOT has changed since then. Practically-speaking, ADS-B-out is required to fly in most of the USA now. This means every plane, not just the airlines, is pinging away it's altitude, heading, and speed every few seconds. Anyone with a tablet & Raspberry Pi can receive these, along with weather radar in the cockpit and see them on a moving map display. You still need to be looking around, but it's a nice second set of eyes. GPS makes a huge difference too. And, I'm much more confident in the other pilots than I am the drivers around Florida. I'm not entirely sure why, but the skills of Florida drivers have been absolutely terrible this year.

LondonElite

Haha. That made me laugh!

tmiw

I got my laptop back from being repaired and it turns out that my Time Machine backup is corrupt. I'm currently running fsck_hfs on it now but if that doesn't work, at least my FreeNAS box has ZFS snapshots of the Time Machine backup all the way back to January that I can try.

KRSW

If you can believe it, since the lockdown started, FL drivers are at least a whole order of magnitude worse than before. I do hear you though, it's bad out there.

tmiw

After a lot of struggling last night, I found out a couple of things about Time Machine. The main thing is that Apple apparently was backing up to a folder on my FreeNAS server called "[computer name].backupbundle"; Apple went back to using .sparsebundle as the extension at some point so both Migration Assistant and the "install from Time Machine" option in recovery mode didn't see the backup at all (and didn't produce any errors or other popup message either).

Second, the most recent backup was in fact corrupt, and multiple attempts to repair it didn't seem to work. (This was the first assumption I had made when the system wasn't seeing any backups.) Fortunately, I only needed to revert back to the snapshot taken the day before the laptop's SSD died to find a backup that it's okay with; now we wait for Migration Assistant to finish restoring.

LondonElite

I have a place on Marco, and drive up 75 to RSW a lot (well I did). Worst bit of interstate on the east coast, imho.

deniah

Only if it had a Garmin G1000 unit

Loren Pechtel

How about the world's slowest USB cable?

The fastest it can go is 57,600 baud.

(It's really a USB to serial cable, a null modem and another USB to serial cable. It provides a "serial" port on two computers that can communicate. It's just a test rig for the real thing which will be a USB to serial cable that connects to a piece of machinery.)

unmesh

I migrated our home network from Netgear routers running FreshTomato as my gateway and repurposed as APs with a wired network using unmanaged switches to a pfSense box as the gateway, managed switches, "real" APs with a controller, and VLANs/subnets for segregating devices into separate classes. Extensive firewalling including GeoIP fencing.

For fun, learned to set up a PXE boot server that can serve up various versions of Windows and Linux to devices that support PXE boot

DYKWIA

Latest...

Last year, my Synology DS918+ NAS died. 3 drives had gone bang a few months prior, and it finally got just a "bad beep of death". Trying to get a fix or replacement from Synology was an exercise in futility, so I pulled out the drives (which were still OK).

I decided to build get a decent spec i5 based "server" tower that enough room for the 4 drives. I got everything up and running and turned it into my own cloud server as described above. I set the 4 drives up as a 24TB Windows Storage Space, and all was well. Until...

About a month ago, I got a notification of some sort of corruption on the storage space. I sorted that out by deleting a couple of files. Then I got a notification that the storage space had gone read only, again with some corruptions. I didn't know what to do at this stage, but I needed to get rid of the storage space if it was unreliable.**

After contemplating for a while (I'm unemployed ), I bought another Synology DS918+ I then needed to get everything onto that somehow, whilst transferring the disks from the existing server. There was only about 4TB of data on the storage space at the time, so my plan was :-

- Remove one drive from the storage pool and set it up as a standalone drive, giving me about 5TB to play with. This took about 2 days.

- Copy everything from the remaining 3-drive storage space to the orphaned drive. This was quite quick and uneventful.

- Remove the 3 drives that made up the storage space, and put them into the NAS, and build a SHR array. After a quick download of the latest firmware, the NAS was up and running and available on the network. I set up a couple of shares and users and set the correct permissions.

- Copy everything from the server to the NAS. Again, this was quick and uneventful.

- Set up the NAS to backup to iDrive.

- Pull the remaining drive from the server and put it into the NAS. As the NAS was still doing its initial low level parity check, it wouldn't let me add the drive. It took about 2 days for this to finish. After that, I was able to add the drive to the array, and after another 3 days of parity checks, the extra space was available.

So, I now had a nicely working NAS and the server connected to it. Except...

The server was actually huge, and had a noisy/whiny CPU fan as well as an overly-beefy power supply. There were now no physical drives in there, so I considered getting a smaller case with a silent power supply.

But then, I happened to see a review of a 10th Generation Intel NUC. I went onto eBuyer, and found it would cost £500 for the NUC and 32GB of RAM and I could use the 1TB NVMe from the server. The "Good-DYKWIA" was saying "step away from the keyboard" (I'm unemployed ), but the "Bad-DYKWIA" won out (I got paid a redundancy payment), and I ordered it for next day delivery.

It was easy to set up, and after downloading the various drivers I had a replacement for the server. It seems to run just as quick as the previous 9th generation i5, and I've had a couple of VMs running.

Both the NUC and the NAS now live in a small cupboard in my office - and are effectively silent. I sold the old server for £400 on Facebook the very next day.

** I later found that I was not alone with Storage Space issues. It appears that Microsoft has introduced some sort of a bug in their Windows 2004 update :-

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/...ting-to-window

The great advice they offer is to make the storage space read-only to stop corruption.

freecia

I'd also like to introduce Bad-DYKWIA to the AMD Ryzen Renoir Asus PN50 https://liliputing.com/2020/07/asus-...processor.html which is available for pre-order in the UK. I'm waiting for it to be available in US.