Posts tagged with "linux"

USB drives are notorious for hiding their SMART data behind finicky USB-to-SATA bridges. If you’ve ever tried to check the health of a Seagate USB drive and gotten frustrated with “unsupported field in scsi command” errors, you’re not alone.

After wrestling with several Seagate drives in my homelab, I finally figured out the magic incantations needed to get SMART data working. Here’s how to do it properly.

Note: The decision to not allow this in Linux as a default was done for a good reasons. You are playing with fire as some drives behave erratically. I have not experienced this with recently purchased USB Drives, but older ones did have quirks and issues. So buyer beware.

My super lean Proxmox 8.3 testbed cluster running Ceph occasionally just decides to lockup a node based on it being incredibly limited on RAM and CPU. As much as I hate rebooting Linux/UNIX systems, this is a case where a nightly reboot of the nodes might help with reliability.

I swapped my physical disks around in my low-end testing hardware cluster. I have a mixture of soldered to the motherboard eMMC and an external USB3 Thumbdrive serving for a root file systems and external /usr volumes now. I would like a quick performance check on reading and writing to those file systems. I also don’t want to setup a huge performance benchmark suite or additional tooling. I just want some quick results at this point.

My basic question is what did I loose in this decision to break out my /usr out to an external USB3 drive. How much performance did I loose?

The Dell Wyse 3040 is a nifty little machine that is extremely small and a low power consumer. They are however not without issues. This is my foray into trying to get a couple of them working on my homelab. I bought a couple in early March 2024 based on watching Apalrd’s videos Dell Wyse 3040 Thin Client Teardown and Installing Proxmox VE 7 on Debian Bullseye with the various Dell Wyse thin clients.

I have a significant investment in my WSLv2 Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS installation. It has my Nvidia GPU setup nicely integrated and several machine learning demos and tests I’ve built and use for keeping current on machine learning. With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS released, I now want to play around in the newer version but don’t want to move or worse copy my entire set of models and repositories across. I have well over 500Gb of content and absolutely don’t want two copies of those floating around. I’m looking for a solution to this and figure others have encountered it.

Hajo on the BlackArmor Forums has an older posting about getting Debian Linux 5.0 (Lenny) installed on BA NAS 110/220/4x0. This is not a port that includes the kernel but simply a minimum install that gets the system setup to install binaries out of the Lenny EABI ARM platform. The kernel that comes with the BA NAS is compatible with those binaries. The newer kernel for the Debian 6 or higher is not compatible with the BA NAS. This has some limitations but offers a way to get to some newer software pre-compiled. I don’t want to loose the existing functionality on my test system but the draw to DLNA services is pretty strong right now.

To top it off, Debian has a nicely setup cross-compilation setup documented for people working on non-Intel platforms. This offers a way to compile newer software without killing myself anymore on building the entire compiler and supporting software myself.

The goal has always been to make the NAS device useful and I want to play my movies off it to my TV upstairs so this might be the next thing I play with on the development NAS.

I figured out something simple but neat on the Black Armor NAS 110 (BA-NAS110) device. It has rsync a powerful file-system replication tool from UNIX.

Caveats are that in order to do this you must have root on the device and a ssh connection with the command line. I’ll write a friendly doc on how to get ‘root’ later. (Just search for Hajo Noerenberg’s work on the subject sans the friendly write up if you want to do it now.)

So, the BA-NAS110 is capable of using rsync from the command line to replicate its data to another NAS or Linux system if you have root on the system. Getting it setup was simple enough but knowing that the rsync daemon and client were on the systems was the trick.

You have to create a rsyncd.conf file since there isn’t one pre-built. Syntax is common to the typical rsync 3.0.4 version.

I found something fun.

The Seagate NAS (Network Attached Storage) that I’ve been using at my house is running an embedded Linux. A NAS is a big network hard drive you can share between computers. I got a root account on it and have found a whole world of fun that could be done in there. Root is the master administrative account for UNIX systems that let you do extra things beyond the normal.

First steps is getting a functional toolchain and then build some trivial tools. The goal would be to have a full set of GNU tools available in a package format for people to use. I want to publish a full working OpenSSH with scp support and rsync for this thing as a starting point. Maybe add some features for NFS. Just digging around on this thing reminded me how much I enjoy hacking on hardware.