November 2024 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

anyone have this bell item?
by Karen Lewellen 06 Mar '25

06 Mar '25

hi all, Layered times, leaving me reading more than commenting. My landlord wishes to provide, but cannot seem to successfully secure from bell, the box below. it's a basic bell cable box vip2502 https://www.bellmts.ca/support/tv/fibe-tv/installation-and-setup/arris-vip2… Anyone have this sitting in a closet? Might be wise to confirm the idea will work. This entire property, even outside, has bell fibe for home coverage including internet..But my on going issues with them have me a bit scared. Thanks, Kare Who has not given up on Over The Air, just gauging offered options.

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"free" physical objects
by Vasileios Papadiamantopoulos 08 Dec '24

08 Dec '24

Hi everyone, a few years back(before COVID) I participated in a very interesting GTALUG meeting. One of the participants talked about some "free" objects/artifacts that are circulating in our world and people can keep them for certain time. Each object has an id and the temporary "guardian" informs a portal that they have it in their possession using this id. Does anyone remembers this conversation? Does anyone know this project? Thank you for your time stopping by my message. Best, -- Vasileios Papadiamantopoulos, PhD Arch

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Re: [GTALUG] Advice on ZFS server
by David Mason 26 Nov '24

26 Nov '24

Sorry, meant to reply-all, in case any of this is of interest to others. On Mon, 25 Nov 2024 at 21:33, David Mason <dmason(a)torontomu.ca> wrote: > On Mon, 25 Nov 2024 at 15:38, Lennart Sorensen < > lsorense(a)csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote: > >> On Mon, Nov 25, 2024 at 11:08:13AM -0500, David Mason via talk wrote: >> > I have spent more than 24 hours researching this... many rabbit holes! >> > >> > As Hugh noted, on the Intel side, ECC awareness is mostly a Xeon thing. >> AMD >> > is much more supportive, but only with some chipsets/motherboards. ECC >> > memory also comes in 2 flavours: >> > 1) Registered (buffered) 80-bit wide, like >> > https://www.kingston.com/datasheets/KF556R36RB-32.pdf >> > 2) Unregistered (unbuffered) 72-bit wide, like: >> > https://www.kingston.com/datasheets/KSM56E46BD8KM-32HA.pdf >> > and, as far as I can tell, they are not inter-compatible if you want >> ECC. >> >> Apparently at the moment, most RDIMM DDR5 is EC8 ECC which is 80bit. >> And most UDIMM is EC4 ECC which is 72 bit. I don't believe there is >> any requirement for it to be that way. >> >> You can not mix buffered and unbuffered as far as I remember. Servers >> with a lot of slots need buffered memory, while systems with only a >> couple of slots per channel don't. >> > > I had seen the buffered one and it seemed a better price than the > unbuffered, but I eventually found unbuffered at a better price yet, which > was good, as that was what the motherboard/CPU combo needed. > > >> > I wanted to take advantage of the NVME SSDs, as they are an order of >> > magnitude faster than SATA, but as I mentioned in another thread, I want >> > RAIDZ3, so I want at least 8 SSDs. So I came across >> >.... > > > Note that this will run mostly headless, apart from maintenance, so I'm >> > more than happy with the built-in Radeon GPU. >> > I have one high performance SSD which will have small boot and swap >> > partitions. The rest are the best cheap SSDs I could find. All 8 will be >> > mostly a large partition for ZFS for a total of about 10TB of RAIDZ3. I >> > could have doubled that for an additional $1250. >> > >> > As this has turned out to be a pretty beefy box, I will likely be >> running >> > Proxmos on top of Debian with ZFS. >> >> So 4 NVMe drives each with 4 PCIe lanes then in a single x16 PCIe slot? >> > > So the PCIe 5 x16 turns into 4 PCIe 4 x4 (because that's what the > multiplexer card is), and one M.2x4 is PCIe 5 and one PCIe 4, so there are > 6 drives that have direct connections to the CPU. The other 2 will be going > through the x670 chip, which means they are multiplexed over one PCIe4x4 > between the chipset and the CPU. This is my understanding from the specs: > https://www.asus.com/ca-en/motherboards-components/motherboards/prime/prime… > but I haven't been able to find a diagram. I base some of what I > "understand" on the diagram of the Taichi near the end of > https://linustechtips.com/topic/1497718-basics-about-pci-lanes-chipset-lane… > > So.... not all Gen 4 x4, but probably close enough... and the best I can > do without Xeon or ThreadRipper. And given that I have 64GiB of memory, it > probably doesn't much matter. :-) > > >> Should give decent bandwidth, although how much of that can your network >> connection even take advantage of? >> >> After all what good is 256Gbps NVMe if your ethernet is 1Gbps or even >> 10Gbps >> > > I'm happy to have the network be the bottleneck. As I mentioned, I plan to > run Proxmox on it, and VMs I run there may use up some of the bandwidth. I > could have saved maybe $500 if I replaced all the NVME SSDs with SATA but > saving 16% to have a disk array that is 10x slower didn't make a lot of > sense to me. Alternatively I could have doubled the storage, but 10TB > already was a huge bump from the current storage I have. (And it's too > late! I have the NVME M.2s sitting on my desk. Waiting for memory, case, > and power.) > > ../Dave >

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Btrfs?
by Giles Orr 26 Nov '24

26 Nov '24

I just (finally) looked up the features of Btrfs, and it sounds fantastic. Possibly ZFS-adjacent but without the nightmarish license problems? Am I missing something? It's in the kernel, but if it was that good, lots of distros would be defaulting to it ... and they're not. A couple have tried, but it hasn't taken off. Can someone fill me in with the details I'm missing? -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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Advice on ZFS server
by David Mason 26 Nov '24

26 Nov '24

I have a decade-old server that gets no love, and is running a very old Debian and ZFS (Linux server 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.63-2+deb7u2 x86_64 GNU/Linux) on a bunch of spinning rust. zpool is producing strange status (i.e. resilvering on multiple drives, making no progress, etc.). So I want to move things off to something more stable. So I want something with at least 5 SST drives for ZFS and a bootable drive not on ZFS (ideally). PCIe would be nice (GBs/sec) but 6 or 8 SATA drives would still be a lot faster than the existing. I'd like it to use DDR5 ECC. I don't need much performance, and I'd like it to be relatively low power. At least a GB Ethernet. I don't need, nor care about, GPUs - at least not at this point. There are a truly mindboggling number of options, but most of the ones that meet my I/O requirements are very high-performance and power-hungry. And almost nothing supports ECC properly On the Intel side there are LGA1851 socket systems. A reasonably-priced one is https://www.canadacomputers.com/en/intel-motherboards/264441/gigabyte-z890-… but it doesn't do ECC properly. On the AMD side there are sTR5 socket systems. A less reasonably priced one is https://www.newegg.ca/gigabyte-trx50-aero-d-extended-atx-amd-trx50-am5/p/N8… but it at least does ECC. Then we get to the CPUs - and even more expensive... I'm not afraid of spending money for a system that will hopefully support our needs for more than another decade (8 2Tb drives is about $1600, but I don't really want to spend another $3000+ for MB+CPU). If I do have to go that high-performance, I'm thinking about Proxmox, but not completely sure - any thoughts on that, too, would be appreciated. Thanks, ../Dave

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Lighting talks for December
by Alan Heighway 23 Nov '24

23 Nov '24

Hello Everyone, We will be having our AGM at the December meeting, we would also like to have 2 or 3 lighting talks... What is a lighting talk? A talk around 5 - 10 minutes that spawns a discussion. Do you have such a talk? Please get in touch... speakers(a)gtalug.org Thanks! Alan. *A*lan *H*eighway <http://heighway.ca/> heighway.ca VA3WAH / VA3YKZ [image: Please consider the environment before printing]

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Re: [GTALUG] slightly ot: your prefered place to buy older electronics?
by Howard Gibson 22 Nov '24

22 Nov '24

BODY { font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12px; } On Mon 04/11/24 6:56 PM , Karen Lewellen via talk talk(a)gtalug.org sent:Given all the nifty side Linux projects, I am wondering what is your favorite place to get such older things. Personally I am rather frantically seeking a pocket am / FM radio, waokperson type or otherwise. got a small one from amazon last year, USB powered, but unlike my older walkperson, it did not like falling from my purse..and do not get me started on the reprehensible accessibility mess the site is now. Would much rather give a local place some love. hunting a record player too, so share your hidden business treasures. Kare Karen, I hope you can read this. I am coping with Primus' webmail, for reasons that might get posted here at some point. I picked up a nice, pocket radio at Radioworld 4335 Steeles Ave. W North York ON M3N 1V7. This is near Highway 400, and accessible through TTC. The website is https://www.radioworld.ca. The radio is by Sangean. You need headphones for it. I use it when I want to listen the radio at work. -- Howard Gibson hgibson(a)eol.ca http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson

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slightly ot: your prefered place to buy older electronics?
by Karen Lewellen 22 Nov '24

22 Nov '24

Given all the nifty side Linux projects, I am wondering what is your favorite place to get such older things. Personally I am rather frantically seeking a pocket am / FM radio, waokperson type or otherwise. got a small one from amazon last year, USB powered, but unlike my older walkperson, it did not like falling from my purse..and do not get me started on the reprehensible accessibility mess the site is now. Would much rather give a local place some love. hunting a record player too, so share your hidden business treasures. Kare

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Debian 11 Live Booted From USB Stick -- Gnome Desktop -- How To Manually Add a Favorites Icon ??
by Steve Petrie 18 Nov '24

18 Nov '24

Greetings To GTALUG Members, I boot debian 11 live from a USB memory stick. The bootable USB stick was created using a command like this: sudo dd if=/.../debian-live-11.5.0-amd64--gnome+nonfree.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M conv=fdatasync status=progress * * * * * * When I left-click Activities at the top left-hand corner of the Gnome desktop, the column of favorite app icons appears, including a Firefox icon. When I right-click the Firefox icon, a block with clickable selections appears beside the Firefox icon, including New Window. Currently, the Firefox icon's New Window selection launches Firefox 91.13.0esr (64-bit). I assume that this Firefox version comes from the bootable debian 11 live usb memory stick. Recently on startup, this Firefox 91.13.0esr (64-bit) has been displaying Mozilla notices about the coming obsolescence of this Firefox version. Mozilla provides a Firefox apt repository, so I dutifully installed the current Firefox .deb using instructions on this web page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux?utm_source=www.m… The Mozilla Firefox .deb installation went fine and a second Firefox icon appeared on the Gnome favorites menu. The new Firefox launched OK. Unfortunately, as I have experienced with other .deb installations, when I re-booted debian 11 live from the USB stick, the new Firefox had disappeared. I install so few .deb apps that my workaround for this disappearing-app issue has been simply to re-install the disappeared app as necessary. However, the installation process for the Firefox .deb is quite lengthy, and I am always using Firefox, so I do not wish to have to do a Firefox .deb re-install from the Mozilla apt repository, every time I re-boot debian 11 from the USB stick. * * * * * * Next, I downloaded Mozilla's firefox-128.4.0esr.tar.bz2 and used the Archive Manager to extract the Firefox app. I can start this version of Firefox by right-clicking on the firefox file in the iinstallation's top firefox directory, and selecting Run. The new Firefox starts and when I display the Help > About Firefox window, I see confirmation that Firefox is up to date and 128.4.0esr (64-bit). So, I now have installed a current version of Firefox ESR that runs fine and does not disappear with every debian 11 live re-boot from the USB stick. * * * * * * If I left-click Activities, and type firefox into the search field that appears under the date/time at the top of the desktop, Gnome displays the icon for the old Firefox 91.13.0esr. When I execute a which firefox command and then invoke that firefox at a command prompt, the old Firefox 91.13.0esr starts. ... user@debian:~$ which firefox /usr/bin/firefox user@debian:~$ /usr/bin/firefox ... * * * * * * In directory /usr/share/applications there is a file firefox-esr.desktop In this file is a line: Exec=/usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr %u My knowledge of how the Gnome applications business works is so sketchy, that paranoia prevents me from messing with this firefox-esr.desktop file to change the Exec= line to point to the new firefox-128.4.0esr firefox file that I can start by a right-click > Run. * * * * * * My question for GTALUG members is: how can I safely manually add a new icon to the Gnome favorites column, for the new Firefox I installed by extracting firefox-128.4.0esr.tar.bz2 into a directory ?? Steve Petrie Etobicoke (Toronto), Ontario, Canada apetrie(a)aspetrie.net 416-233-6116

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Ubuntu upgrade
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 13 Nov '24

13 Nov '24

I rarely use Ubuntu so I'm late to observing some things. I just updated a 20.04 LTS system to a 22.04 LTS system. I did it via a command line (through SSH). There were several warnings about SSH being dangerous because communications could be lost when problems arose. SSH is my normal way of communicating with headless machines so I thought that this was a bit unfortunate. It turned out that I didn't have a problem. The installer informed me that ThunderBird would be provided via SNAP and that there is no other form. I don't like SNAPs but I probably wouldn't even have noticed if the installer didn't tell me. I wonder how many other SNAPs are installed. I think that I can ask the system but I've got other fish to fry at the moment. The upgrade seems to have worked rather painlessly. I'm used to Fedora version updates where only updates of a year are promised to work. This Ubuntu update was a two year update: a nice technical achievement. When I log in now (via SSH) I get this announcement: 9 additional security updates can be applied with ESM Apps. Learn more about enabling ESM Apps service at https://ubuntu.com/esm It seems unethical to withhold security updates. This is one reason why I don't like Ubuntu / Canonical. Long before the update, my system failed to come up in a desktop environment. It just came up in a console. That console is almost unreadable: UltraHD in a 15.6" screen. The console has 135 rows and 480 columns! I never figured out why the system didn't come up in the desktop environment. I spent a little time at that but it didn't really a lot since I only used the Ubuntu installation once a year or so for a program that Fedora didn't have. The system upgrade was an attempt to bypass the bug. No such luck. I guess I'll put a little more effort in analysis.

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