Category: Tech

I am only going to use it as backup. I bought the cheapest Seagate. Name of the drive is “Seagate Barracuda 4TB”. I started a backup and it was faster than expected. After a few hours when i checked if the backup was finished it had stopped with an error. The error message said that the drive had been removed. It was still visible in explorer. In the system log i could see that the drive had been removed. Strange because it was now connected. I restarted the backup and a few hours later the backup had stopped because the drive was removed. The backup had stopped nearly at the same place as before. That looked suspicious. I started too google about this Seagate drive. It is a SMR drive with an CMR cache. My guess is that the drive ran out of CMR cache after 400GB and got so slow that the SAS card thought it had been removed or failed. I connected it through USB2 instead. The the backup would finish OK but it was much slower. I will keep this drive but i will never buy a SMR drive again.

I got the hard drive working. I tried different SAS HBA cards. With an old LSI card i could talk to the drive. When i ran smartctl i noticed a line “Formatted with type 2 protection”. That means the drive is formatted with 8 extra bytes for each block. I says block size 4096, but is not true. The 8 bytes should be removed by some SAS card before the operating system sees the data. It confused Linux and Windows. After formatting the drive with sg_format -F /dev/sda it looks OK.

I bought a HP server cheap on ebay. There are lots of used HP servers on ebay. I bought it from Germany. It was delivered to my apartment. A girl came and even took it all the way up to my apartment. When i bought a previous server a guy with lorry just put it on the ground on the parking lot. First i started it up without any PCIe cards. It was quiet for a rack server. Everything was working. I shutdown it down and put in 10gbps network card. when i started it up it sounded like a vacuum cleaner. I was thinking “what went wrong”. I shut it down and removed the network card. It was quiet again. I realized that i cant put any card in it. I have to use what is integrated. When i search for any solution to the fan problem i found a reddit article about a hacked version of ILO4 firmware. I did not dare to try it. A few days ago decided that i have to something about the HP server for it to be useful. I flashed the hacked firmware into my server. After that i could set max speed for the fans. Without any card the fans were it 27%. With one card they went up to 43%. I set the limit to 27% and the server is quiet with two cards. I have checked the temperatures and all are far from the limit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/hix44v/silence_of_the_fans_pt_2_hp_ilo_4_273_now_with/

1. Download iLO4 2.50 CP027911.scexe We’ll use this for flashing the hacked firmware

2. Download the custom 2.73 ROM We’ll swap out the original firmware in the 2.50 iLO4.

3. Disable iLO security by way of the system maintenance switch on your motherboard

4. Disable the HP Lights-Out Driver

Here’s the error message you might see if you don’t.

ERROR: hp Lights-Out driver "hpilo" is loaded.

       Run commands “/etc/init.d/hp-snmp-agents stop”,        “/etc/init.d/hp-health stop”,        “/etc/init.d/hp-ams stop” and       “rmmod hpilo” to unload it and retry. []

For Ubuntu, I had to do the following:

sudo modprobe -r hpilo

5. Replace the 2.50 ROM with the 2.73 ROM and flash

sh ./CP027911.scexe --unpack=ilo_250
cd ilo_250
cp /path/to/ilo4_273.bin.fancommands ilo4_250.bin
sudo ./flash_ilo4 --direct

CP027911.scexe

ilo4_273.bin.fancommands

I seen this error many for at least 10 years. Restarting Wbadmin.msc is not going to help. You must open command line and run “wbadmin delete catalog”. After that you have to configure the scheduled backup again. I have done this many times through the years.

Can only keep one version on a network share

Cant backup to a Samba network share

It is not allowed to mix ordinary volumes with CSV volumes

And then we have the old crashes when starting and catalog must be deleted. 😠

A few years ago i built a storage server. It was supposed to provide storage for other computers. It never worked well. A few months ago i decided to find out why there was errors for clients. I found out that the powersupply to the harddrives was bad. Voltage drop in cables and not thick enough cables. I soldered some 1.5mm2 cables with SATA power connectors. It still was voltage drop. SATA power connectors are not good. You cant use one connector for current to four SAS drives. I switched to WAGO connectors. There is a small lever you pull up. Insert the cable and pull down the lever. Can handle much more current than SATA connectors. After that the storage was reliable. I still did not want to move my websites to the storage server. If i want to fix something with my webserver computer then the site would be offline. If i wanted to do something with my storage computer then the site would be offline. Every time i installed updates to the storage computer then i would have to stop all virtual machines that were using storage on the storage computer. After a while i started to think: it cant be this way they do it at datacenters. They cant tell everybody that they have to shutdown their VMs because a server needs to restart. I rent some VPS and it is running all the time. After looking and testing different things i found Windows storage spaces direct. It had lots of requirements. It looked like what i needed. Now i use it for my website. I install updates to one node. Move roles over to another node. Restart node. When it is running again i fail back roles. Then it takes a few hours for the volumes to resynchronize. Website is online all the time. Now i can get close to 100% uptime.

I bought a HP Proliant DL380P gen8 server a few days ago. It was nice and quiet before i put in a network card. Then it sounded like a vacuum cleaner. I took out the network card. It was quiet again. I put in a LSI SAS card. It sounded like a vacuum cleaner again. If i put in a non HP SSD or hard drive ILO believes the drive is getting overheated. Then it turns up the fans. If it cant get the temperature out of some hardware it turns up the fans. When i was looking for a solution for this i saw that HPs reply is that this doesnt happen if you use HP parts. My Dell poweredge server handles this much better. If it detects a card in a PCIe slot it increases fan speeds a little.

Next time i will buy a Dell server instead. The HP server i bought a few days ago have the same error as the one i had before. It reads drive temp wrong. Believes the drive is overheating and turns up the fans. Some Kingston SSDs works. If i put in only one PCIe card it sounds like vacuum cleaner. Because if the card is not HP then it cant read the temp and turns up the fans. It is possible to set the raid card in HBA mode, but then it cant boot from drives connected to the card. It does not have UEFI. I have to use what is integrated in the server. I have installed Linux on USB removable drive. Disconnected the drive bays on the front and pulled a SAS cable from inside out the back of the server so i can connect some 3.5 hard drives.

😄 Few needs blockchain technology. It is an inefficient way of storing information. It is difficult to fix errors in the data. Most companies wants to own their data.

https://www.coindesk.com/ibm-blockchain-revenue-misses-job-cuts-sources

Job losses at IBM (NYSE: IBM) escalated as the company failed to meet its revenue targets for the once-fêted technology by 90% this year, according to one of the sources.’IBM is doing a major reorganization,’ said a source at a startup that has been interviewing former IBM blockchain staffers. ‘There is not really going to be a blockchain team any longer. Most of the blockchain people at IBM have left.

Hi Scott,

It's certainly disappointing to receive your email like that. I see that
you're really upset, and I think we have a shared interest in
deescalating this. You've mentioned the desire to talk about this in
public, so I'm responding in the announcement thread to you, as this
seems like the appropriate venue for discussion.  I've also CC'd the
FreeBSD Security Officer. I've responded to your email and its threats
in line mailing-list style below:

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 6:08 PM Scott Long <scottl at netgate.com> wrote:
> What you and Kyle did was tell the world that there are a number of
> zero-day exploits in the code.  You gave us no details until after the
> fact, gave us no time to mitigate, correct, and publish before your
> announcement and Kyle's code drop, and used the opportunity to
> bash the code, and by extension us, for your own self-gain.

😄

https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2021-March/006499.html