Category: project

Random thoughts on Supermicro Risers, LSI LBAs, power supplies, ZFS and other fun server things (#P34)

With the failed 450W SFX power supply separated into a regular post last week, now’s the time to waffle on about what happened besides that.

Well, Solaris 11.4 (evil developer/home use licensing, so no current service packs) still uses minimal ashift as default instead of a fixed value of 12. ashift is the exponent of the power of 2 that is used as smallest assignable portion of data, so basically sector size. “Old” default is 9, as 2^9 is the well known 512 byte sector size that most old hard disks had as both logical and physical size, and which they reported as such. […]


Supermicro X9SRW-F Ivy Bridge EP compatibility comparison (#P33)

Some canned content for today – back when making the Supermicro 2011 board fit my needs (#P23,#P24), I stumbled upon the Ivy Bridge thing. Technically, the two rack servers that I got should both be compatible with the E5-2600 series (Sandy Bridge EP), as well as E5-2600v2 series (Ivy Bridge EP). The product website states that “BIOS version 3.0 or above is required” for this to work, and both boards run the most recent version (not that there’s so many versions to choose from). Both had a E5-2630L installed, so SB-EP. […]


The PCB (Christmas) Tree (#P32)

Epiphany has already passed and St. Knut’s day is next Wednesday, it’s about time to stop being lazy and get the Christmas tree out of the living room.
Well, yes, but not the usual way. As shown previously, it’s not an ordinary tree. It’s green and it has fancy little lights all around, but it’s also containing significant amounts of lead and it needs a PoE port to operate.

Meet the PCB Tree.

Made from scrap circuit boards, random bits of wire, leaded solder and a couple of Chinese ingredients, it’s a wonderful Christmas abomination that sat the entire last year in my office and received a significant addition in early December 2020. […]


3D printed switch repair parts (#P31F1)

Some more details on the Bosch oven repair. These are the replacement parts that I ordered from Sculpteo, which, according to its own website, is the market leader in online ordered printed parts. Sculpteo also happened to be bought by BASF this spring, and they’re mainly printing in France but offer support in German (with offices in Germany, I think). They offer laser cutting as well but charge additional shipping cost for those, which made me skip parts of my order…

The part in question was already featured in WHL #61 (crappy automated model generation) after which I recreated it by hand. […]


Bosch Gourmet 8400 oven mode selector switch repair (Dreefs 4-DPS/260) (#P31)

A long, tedious blog post for today. This has been in the making for about 9 weeks and I’ve been looking for parts for another year or two. Pictures have been taken on multiple occasions in multiple locations, so it’s a hotchpotch that somewhat reflects the process. This is the use case for the 3D model generation of the WHL #61 post.

Our Bosch Gourmet 8400 microwave and baking oven has been there for as long as I can remember. It’s a huge and darn heavy thing for a microwave oven (27l volume!), and rather small for a baking oven with grill (broiler) functionality. […]


Calore Z1362/R1 waterbed heating controller repair (#P30)

An emergency repair from last Friday night, you know, the ones with the deep green WAF that could offset all your wrongdoings of the entire week if there were any…

I’ve been sleeping on a waterbed for 12 years now; it was the first major (read: expensive) thing I bought after I started going to university. Sleeping on a sofa bed doesn’t really work long-term, but that’s what you do as a broke student with no family to step in. Said waterbed sprung a leak earlier this year on one of the corner seams, so the inner mattress part got replaced (plus the worn topper). […]


ESP32 hardware faders (#P27)

Maybe my google-fu is rusty, or there’s simply no full example of this on the Interwebs…that’s pretty strange.

This is about the cherished ESP32 that will feature an extension/replacement of my #P7 series. This was an ESP8266 board that replaced a dumb lighting control, offering sensor logging to a database. I quickly found out that the limited pin count (and quirks) of the ESP8266 would require me to think about e.g. shift register extensions to make the entire project viable – which now got replaced with the large ESP32 that does have all the flexibility that I need. […]


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. […]


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. […]


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. […]