USB ISO multiboot script – Ventoy (#P26)

Speaking of the GitHubs on the Interwebs: I’ve been using a somewhat selfmade bash script to make bootable USB media for quite some time now. It’s capable of running ISO files directly from the USB drive and also the option for a separate partition for some Windows WIM extraction, in order to offer bootable Windows install media. As I’m the only user and there’s not that much demand for running different Linuxes at the moment, that script is badly maintained and only got an update when like a new Ubuntu LTS hit the market. […]

28th June 2020 28th June 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

Netgear EX6120 OpenWrt support (#P25)

Looks like I missed a post last week…ah well, here it is.
From the bunch of defective hardware that I bought back in March there’s still some repaired access points left. One of the hobbyists that was interested in some EX3700 APs asked about the EX6120 that are more abundant, faster, and not much more expensive. He’s going to revamp his WiFi and wanted some OpenWrt mesh. Well…back then the hardware compatibility list said it was somewhat compatible, because both are closely related and the EX3700 has support. The EX6120 firmware was linked to the EX3700. […]

21st June 2020 22nd June 2020 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

Sneaked into BigCliveLive (#E13)

As you might have heard already, bigclive(dotcom) is running a separate channel nowadays for live streams such as the occasional Manx Beard Club or the more recent weekly corona streams. It’s called BigCliveLive and I’m obviously subscribed to both of them. Aside from the last two livestreams I’ve watched the entirety of those channels…it should be trivial to find out the total playtime with the very handy youtube_dl tool that I use for all of my YouTube subscriptions, but it’s probably comparable to EEVblog, that is, in the medium to high 100s of hours. […]

1st June 2020 1st June 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

Supermicro X9SRW-F small riser mounting adapter (#P24)

More fun with the Supermicro X9SRW (and we’re still not done yet!)

The two X9SRW machines that I got had the same CPU and RAM situation, but one of them was in a 815 (1U) case, and the other one still is in a 825 (2U) one. I scrapped the noisy 815 for my board and allocated the more spacious 825. Fans are not the only thing that differs, though, as the added height also caused Supermicro to exchange the riser card for a different one. While the top riser is just an angled PCIe x8 connector (high up to make room for some heat sinks underneath), the bottom one is a WIO type that distributes 32 lanes in total. […]

24th May 2020 25th May 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

Construction fails in networking gear (#R9)

Ah well, I’m too lazy to craft another post dealing with things currently in development – let’s rant instead.

A few weeks ago I bought this huge lot of “failed” networking electronics that finally led to having an 8-port PoE switch at home, which is a nice addition – the MikroTik wAP ac finally runs on PoE as intended, the four ports (2x1G, 2x100M) of the Fritz Box router are no longer overcrowded, I did have a good time repairing two of those switches easily and I didn’t even spend a penny on all that thanks to a few sellable items (plus brownie points for donating quite a few more). […]

10th May 2020 10th May 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

Fitting a proprietary Supermicro X9SRW-F into a standard 3U 836 case (#P23)

Blogging’s a bit tedious right now, as shipping parts is rather slow at the moment, and there’s so much going on at work…

This has been in the making for the past two months now. Some very nice dude gave away “old” servers at a popular German hardware forum, but requested local pickup due to the difficult and expensive shipping of entire server chassis. These were decommissioned colocation servers from his own business, aged 7 to 12 years and no longer viable for 24/7 operation – still decent machines for occasional use. […]

26th April 2020 24th May 2020 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

3.5″ Floppy disk drive benchmarking (WHL #57)

Yeah, you read that right. Time for some serious benchmarking of good old floppy drives. The type of benchmark that the interwebs have been waiting for.

In case you’re questioning my mental health right now: Nope, not affected by COVID-19 or the “quarantine” (that only keeps me from delivering a 2U server and causes people to act strange in the supermarkets). I’ve gone mad quite a long time ago. Probably a glitch during assembly.

Now, I got four bad boys here, revving their, umm, stepper drives?
Alps Electric DF354H(121G), 33wk 2007 – full size 3.5″ […]

12th April 2020 13th April 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

Oral-B toothbrush stand generation upgrade (#P22)

After just eleven years of excellent service, my Oral-B 25.526.3/”9500 Triumph” electric toothbrush died from mechanical failure – the gears went a bit toothless (oh the irony), so while vibration was still on, it wouldn’t rotate the brush. I did exchange the NiCd battery some years ago, but the drive cannot be disassembled, so that was a total loss. Meh.
At the time I spent 70€ and this model was on the higher end of the Oral-B product line. 11 years later even the cheapest models are lithium battery based and I would expect essential technology has trickled down to the base models. […]

22nd March 2020 31st March 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment

CR2025/CR2032 battery dummy for power consumption tests and a hungry Supermicro board (#P21)

This bugged me for quite some time now: Ever since a very nice dumpster revealed a stripped Supermicro server chassis including a Supermicro X8DTL board (Dual-1366) to me, the BIOS battery of that system seemed to be empty all the time. You see, I use this machine as an offline backup, so once every couple of months I fire it up, transfer my data, and unplug it from power and ethernet. And almost always it doesn’t start right up because the CMOS data is gone. Ideally it should be a headless unit, so that’s highly inconvenient.

I finally got around to test this – the fix will be another project for some day in the future. […]

8th March 2020 15th February 2020 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

3D printed custom tool holders for my workbench (#P21)

Printing time, folks.

I recently had the urge to declutter my work bench. I usually prefer buying tools with proper holders, cases, mounting hooks, you name it. Some however are not offered with one (KS Tools 5.5mm/M3 ratchet wrench! Everything larger is part of the holder), some are only part of my collection (a set of Torx screw drivers T7-T20, so not including T5/T6/T25/T30), and some are one piece only, e.g. calipers. That stuff amassed over the last couple of years and it was time to get that sorted. The table was blocked for no good reason.

So I did. […]

23rd February 2020 23rd February 2020 By Bzzz In No Comment