In theory. I’ve on a few occasions tried to upgrade very out-of-date Gentoo installs, just because it is theoretically possible, not because it was the smart thing to do
It wasn’t pretty and none of the cases I tried ended up succeeding. These things generally being old hardware of course didn’t help, because Gentoo, so slow builds… On top of the issue that finding some of the old source tarballs wasn’t always quite that easy. So I’ve become a little bit more prudent about keeping them up-to-date, even the systems I don’t use often.
I still like Gentoo, but if you can’t stay up-to-date to some reasonable extent I’d really not recommend it
Might be easier with a binary distro, and of course, depends on how out-of-date your system is as well, some of mine were half a decade, or more, out-of-date. For systems I expect to mostly “sit” for long periods I might just go with FreeBSD in the future, assuming the hardware is supported, anyway.
I had this experience with an outdated raspi build. I was adding ppa’s, following lots of guides- best thing to do was burn it down and build over.
xrdp work-around for remote rdp session into PopOS (or Ubuntu for that matter) if not logged out locally.
The hacky part, its not sharing currently open windows from one session with the other, so it starts a new session but you can’t use apps open in the other running session, there is a PID conflict or something.
I’ve spent a solid day cleaning the RAM, testing, booting from various USBs/Distros, installed a few over each-other, installing packages, work-arounds, relearning stuff, new learning stuff. Maybe I can finally learn me some kdenlive? I was starting to get the hang of Davinci so I might pop back to that- a bonus is they build for Windows and Linux, and I think they have an interesting server share setup.
Davinci Resolve system76 (popos) instructions because Linux:
Ready for this chinga to arrive, and follow some vids on getting it talking with my pfSense VLANs and finally FINALLY a VLAN aware AP and some gosh darn segmentation of my wifi stuff.
Found a neat article that tells you how to find the URL of the not-so-well-known CentOS .ISO built and maintained by DaVinci Resolve, supposidly optimized with Nvidia drivers and other goodies that optimize it’s performance:
Plan is to then install remote console tools, kdenlive, maybe syncthings and maybe actually - finally - mess around with editing and doing stuff. So much stuff to document:
Fixed it following a guide that added some repos, but that wouldn’t be keeping with the theme of this blog, as I am me, and I am full of fail.
I’m going to blow away this whole VM, my dumb ass didn’t know you must run a GPU for DaVinci to run (I have to tell the little voice in my head saying to get a server GPU that plays with xcp-ng and passthrough to shut up).
I can’t get kdenlive to run, be it appimage or other method. I get:
Teh googles is giving me a goose chase on this. After spending all day and already having these things working on some bare metal boxes, I’m tapping out. Was a good re-fresh on ncp-ng, updating it and some other rust I let build up.
Telling you if I had a channel it would be like the inverse style of L1 and Lawrence, it would be edited cuts of the hours and hours of fail, climbing over wall after wall and killing whiskey. Sometimes ending with success, sometimes total tail. Subs would be 12 lol, the comment section would be pure murder by “well actually” Linux types.
It would probably get me answers better than googling because of Cunningham’s Law.
Been looking at logs- I newly added Chromecast ultra on my IoT segment has been pestering my Plex server IP, mostly on port 10237 but a little of 64761.
Really weird cause I’ve never casted to this chromecast ultra from my plex. I could understand if it was my older 1st gen chromecast I messed around with to punch wholes in the IoT firewall rules to cast media from my LAN Plex. But this is a newly added Ultra…
Very weird. Teh googles (ironically) is not telling me that chromecasts use ports 10237 or 64761.
My guess is that by using pfsesne avahi the ultra sees the plex on the LAN, but when it tries to ‘talk’ for whatever creepy reason, my rules kick into effect (IoT chromecasts can only talk to my plex via port 32400).
Weird how my second Ultra thats been on for a long time doesn’t seem to do the same thing…
I did a noctua swap on a supermicro server for an office where there was no server room (just a rack in a corner). Been working for a few years now no problem. Didn’t use foam like that though, that’s a nice touch.
I’ve also had luck setting the server fans to 100% and then using this controller to dial them down. You just have to be careful because you can dial down the power to the point that the fans don’t spin at all.
I had always thought just replace OEM with Noctua’s (same size), play with fan curve a little- call it a day. He goes that extra step of Nactua + getting much larger fan version. I assume the foam helps a little with noise from vibration transmission.
Not sure how good his audio setup is but it sounds like it can be in a home office, pretty neat.
Neat, but wouldn’t try it unless it really, really, really needs to be in an office or something.
Don’t want to rain on his parade but:
he did not show drive temperatures
his chassis appears to not even be half filled? (half of the front bays appear not in use, and, presumably, none of the rear ones)
he did not mention what type of drives he uses
Based on my own experience I really have my doubts this could adequately cool a CSE-847 filled with 7200rpm drives (even with only the front bays filled).
Still, it’s a non-destructive mod (which gets a big thumbs up from me), so there’s that, can easily back out if it doesn’t work out. If someone does try this with a filled box I’d be interested in seeing some metrics
I should add that, in my experience, these can be made acceptably quiet (as in: you won’t hear them in the next room, and you can have a normal conversation next to one) without going to these lengths (assuming we’re not talking about the SAS1 version with non-PWM fans).
FWIW this was mine when still filled with 24 7200rpm drives in the front:
The gap is where I replaced the passive CPU cooler with an active one (and relocated the chassis fans to the appropriate Fan A header) and the spike in rpm is because the pwm on this board is derpy as hell and doesn’t spin fans down after it spins them up. Setting it to full blast and then back to standard/optimal fixes that.
I have since then removed 8 drives (the hottest ones), resulting in this:
Yeah he kinda flies through his videos but he mentions how he used other fans and they did not meat the requirements, so I’m assuming he did go into software to check on temps.
If you watch his other vids he is a legit geek and gets very into depth, so I am willing to extend the benefit of the doubt that he does some level of validation- he just isn’t good at editing that stuff in.
Oof, yeah he has no mention of filling that thing up for the sake of testing.
Thankfully my rack mount old Enterprise stuff has a home in the garage (noise), but when the summer comes I need to upgrade my garage’s venting. I’m always interested in mods that quiet down compute though.
Been subbed to him ever since I saw the SATA power splitter video. Didn’t notice this video though, probably because he doesn’t post as regularly, so Youtube algorithm was being Youtube algorithm…
I don’t doubt it works for him, just a shame he didn’t mention what he has in there (maybe he talks about it in another video, I saw he mentioned in the comments there’s at least some Exos drives in there). It would give us the ability to gauge whether it’d be a viable option with whatever we’ve got lying around.
Mine’s in the basement (==garage), so noise is only a consideration to the extent that you need to be able to get near it without hearing protection, and that I don’t want to hear it through the floor (concrete floor), or the garage door. Quieter is better, of course.
The ways I quieted the CSE-847 down to very reasonable levels is basically:
make sure fans are attached to the motherboard instead of the backplane(s) (latter seems to be the default, at least mine came that way)
make sure to use Fan $LETTER headers (as Mark points out as well)
add active cooler to the CPU(s). This keeps chassis fans from ramping up because of CPU temps.
I might try pulling 3 of the fans (so one row, basically). It won’t make a difference for noise, but it will for power consumption. Hadn’t really considered doing that until he brought it up.
Is that a CSE-846? I wonder how much difference the extra stuff in the back of the CSE-847 makes, even if the bays are not in use. I mean the 847 is pretty cramped…
I don’t doubt it, my office is an oven in the summer, and that’s just because of my desktop…
My rack is, thankfully, in the basement/garage. So without heat source temperatures tend towards 14 degrees (Celsius. The rack adds around 2-ish degrees, even though it’s a darn large room. It does creep up in the summer to 20-ish when there’s a prolonged heatwave, but that should get better once we replace the garage door with something insulated. At least I do hope so )
The drives I removed were Seagate Constellation ES.2’s by the way, and they ran pretty darn hot compared to the WD/HGSTs that are still in there. Hence why I was wondering what he’s got in there.
It’s the jbod version of the CSE-847, whatever that is. So yeah, I guess no actual server in there, just disks, backplane and controller board.
In the 36-bay jbod, there’s a mix of HGST Deskstar NAS, some enterprise Seagate I forget and WD Reds. It’s an archive that inherits drives from other things.
