Author: Travis Newman

  • Raspbian Jessie w/ external / on btrfs ?

    Raspberry Pi 2 fun this weekend!

    Quite successfully managed to relocate / to an external disk.  In my case, the external disk is an old 1TB hard drive in one of these snazzy docks (does not pass S.M.A.R.T. data).  Then I tried it with an SSD to see if it was any faster.  It was, but not enough to justify its immigration from my desktop as a cache device.
    That’s all well and good, but I’d like to achieve some redundancy.
    First, I started with MDADM, that didn’t work.  Then I moved to btrfs.  Seemed promising, but I get a kernel panic during boot.
    Guides used:
    Will do more fiddling later..
  • I made a thing

    A while back, I got the itch for some retail therapy and bought a 2U, 12-bay Supermicro from the nice folks over at Garland Computers.  Couple of quad E5-somethings, a tooon of RAM, and a bit of capacity in the form of a ZFS array smeared over a mish-mash 1- and 2TB hard drives.  Things were great, until the sound got to me..  and its not a fan I could do anything about; it was the fan inside the hot-swap power supply :(.  It was way more storage than i needed, massive energy hog, and that damn fan.. so it went to being on all the time, to being on most of the time, to not being on at all.

    Maybe it was all the stuff about this being the 25th anniversary of Linux and all, I felt the need to redo my desktop.  Initially it was Kubuntu Xenial on the cheapy 240gb SSD..  then I realized how many 1TB drives I had sitting around.  I tore it down and rebuilt it using these fantastic instructions on how to install Ubuntu root on ZFS.

    travis@chisburger:~$ sudo zpool status -v
    [sudo] password for travis:
     pool: rpool
    state: ONLINE
     scan: resilvered 7.89G in 0h3m with 0 errors on Sat Sep  3 11:15:20 2016
    config:

           NAME                                              STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
           rpool                                             ONLINE       0     0     0
             mirror-0                                        ONLINE       0     0     0
               ata-ST31000528AS_5VP05QRD-part1               ONLINE       0     0     0
               ata-ST1000DM003-9YN162_W1D1M3Q0-part1         ONLINE       0     0     0
           cache
             ata-SPCC_Solid_State_Disk_15022293000000000380  ONLINE       0     0     0

    errors: No known data errors

    travis@chisburger:~$ sudo zpool list -v
    NAME   SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT rpool   928G   536G   392G         –    26%    57%  1.00x  ONLINE  –  mirror   928G   536G   392G         –    26%    57%
       ata-ST31000528AS_5VP05QRD-part1      –      –      –         –      –      –
       ata-ST1000DM003-9YN162_W1D1M3Q0-part1      –      –      –         –      –      –
    cache      –      –      –         –      –      –
     ata-SPCC_Solid_State_Disk_15022293000000000380   224G  9.70G   214G         –     0%     4%

    This is running in a desktop with a 4690k with 20gb of RAM.  I’m very curious to see what effect, over time, that cache device will have on responsiveness.

    Through the course of setting this up, one of my 1TB drives failed, and I was able to replace it no problem.  I just needed to remember to run ‘grub-install’ on the new drive.

    Hope everyone is having good luck with their projects!

  • Quakecon 2015


    Wed 11:07PM Got all my stuff packed up at mi casa


    Thu 9:27AM Unloaded at the Hilton Anatole


    Thu 9:43AM The hotel let us use a cart briefly to get our stuff in from the outside, then they had to take it back. Fortunately, we befriended a father and son duo that were nice enough to share their cart with us. Next year: cart is mandatory. They’re so handy and it seemed like everyone had one this year. We talked to some people about their carts and it sounded like decent ones can be had for cheap.


    Thu 9:54AM Daunting line


    Thu 10:29AM Got barcoded!


    Thu 10:39AM Daunting line moving relatively quickly


    Thu 12:17PM My seeeeeeat! I really really really really wish we had one of these big giant sturdy tables for the apartment. When I have my computer at a proper desk and chair as opposed to a tv stand and sofa, I really miss being able to sit upright and use a keyboard and mouse properly. Anyone in the DFW getting rid of a long table like this?


    So this is pretty much what my screen looked like the entire time. Skies of Arcadia on the right, and something else on the left. Sometimes it was the FAQ, sometimes it was reddit, sometimes it was hearthstone. The setup worked quite well. Avery and I would take turns playing/browsing, one on the controller, the other on the keyboard and mouse. Its definitely not uncommon for people to play games split-screen at Quakecon, but this is the most I’ve “shared” a computer at Quakecon, and I’m very pleased with the experience. I think it worked out really well! Also you can see Twitch running in the browser. Avery set it up so that we could stream Skies of Arcadia with the ambient noise of BYOC on top of it. I plan on streaming the remainder of my Skies of Arcadia playthrough when I get setup again at my apartment.


    Tools of the trade


    New keycaps! I got a few others in the baggie but this was my favorite.


    Avery and travnewmatic


    WTB girlfriend ad written on half a paper towel posted on the Quakecon Craigslist


    Sunday morning, got our stuff hauled out of the BYOC


    Making our way back to the front of the hotel


    Guard duty while waiting for Mike to bring the car around


    Obligatory 2015 BYOC shirt and badge pic


    Fantastic year this year. Kinda feels like a blur right now. Sooooooo many random battles in Skies of Arcadia. While I didn’t accomplish my goal of completing Skies of Arcadia.. or completing the first disc of Skies of Arcadia… I still had an awesome time. I am reminded of how great of a game it is, instilled with a drive to finish it once and for all.. also feeling good about learning how to stream stuff on twitch, at least the basics of it. Glad its over, really looking forward to getting home tonight (currently have 5 more hours at work).. Made a few new friends.. Another successful year!