OutsourcedMath Social Network

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

Right, FINALLY doing the SSD upgrade in this old laptop with the Extremely Cursed SATAExpress SSD. I bought a 2242 size NVMe drive to stick in the (unused) WWAN slot

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

The Old Laptop is going to be my new daily driver. I’ve been using it exclusively for a few weeks now, but I know the 256GB SSD is going to be the choke-point very soon.

Still, a decent upgrade. Old main rig is a i7-2600K with 32GB RAM, 512GB SATA SSD, and 8GB Radeon R9 290X, still VERY usable for a 10-year-old rig. Old (new) laptop is a ThinkPad T460p - i7-6820HQ, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD, and … uh … a 2GB GeForce 940MX. Yeah, the GPU sucks (and sucks much less than the built-in HD530), but I rarely play 3D games now so it’s not a great loss, and I gain portability which I didn’t have before.

I’ve even got the matching NOT-USB dock!

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

First things first, make a safe image of the existing SSD.

Next, figure out how the fuck to open an encrypted disk. Then use BTRFS to save the subvols.

Then, because I don’t trust either of those two methods to restore properly, mount the BTRFS filesystems and copy the contents out too.

Then I can safely* discard the utterly cursed SATAExpress SSD. Probably. Maybe I’ll swap a SATA SSD in instead, for even more storage space.

sortius 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

that's a lot of effort where you could just nuke it from orbit and start from scratch

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

@sortius I’ve got enough customization on the existing disk that I CBF repeating

@sortius

sortius 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

aah, that sucks. I know what you mean if it's all weird shit for development, especially buggy stuff that requires installs in correct order, and odd steps between install/configs

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

@sortius yep, I’ve got 3 different embedded vendor toolchains installed so far, still need to install at least 4 more

@sortius

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

pigz -c1 go brrrrrrrrr

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

NAS go cromchcromch

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

rsync go ebebebebebeeeee

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

Oh wait, fuck, this is Linux NFSv4 talking to a Solaris NFS server. Of course the ownership and permissions are completely hosed.

Oh well, tar it is then

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

Speaking of Linux NFSv4, I wonder if that 100% repeatable kernel panic bug we found almost 20 years ago ever got fixed? Was reported to RedHat, but I left the org before the ticket was closed.

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

I don’t remember the exact details, but somehow it involved an absolute symlink hosted in the NFS server pointing to /dev/stdin

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

Command ‘gtar’ not found, did you mean:

command ‘ftar’ from deb fai-client (0%, 0 votes)
command ‘qtar’ from deb hxtools (0%, 0 votes)
command ‘ptar’ from deb perl (7%, 1 vote)
command ‘tar’ from deb tar (92%, 12 votes)

13 voters. Poll end: 4 months ago

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

No really, I did mean gtar, but thanks for “helping” I guess

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

Fucking GNU systems

Colin 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

GNU/Fucked

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

Anyway, turns out this restore will probably be easier than I thought - the new SSD doesn’t support 4K block sizes, so I can just blat the raw image from the old SSD on, adjust the partition table, then resize.

First, verify the new SSD can actually store as many bits of data as it claims.

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

This is your regular reminder that `openssl aes-128-cbc -in /dev/zero -out /path/to/dev` is faster than `dd if=/dev/urandom of=/path/to/dev` if you want lots of random-looking incompressible data

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

Well it ate all the data it claimed it could. Slowed down a fair bit towards the end though, think the flash controller was struggling a bit and “only” writing random 1MB blocks at 180MB/sec

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

… you’re fucking shitting me. After all that, the NVMe SSD is preventing power-on when it’s installed?!

George Haritonidis 4 months ago • ActivityPub

@jpm

The No Take, Only Throw dog meme. The first panel is captioned “test NVME SSD”. The second panel is captioned “no power on”. The third panel is captioned “only test NVME SSD”.

@Joel Michael

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

@georgeharito the SSD was tested in another machine

@George Haritonidis

George Haritonidis 4 months ago • ActivityPub

I knew my meme-creating skills would fall flat

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

Well, that was an entire fucking day wasted

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

So, at this point I have 3 options:

1. Keep the cursed 256GB SATAExpress drive (or find a bigger one for approximately $0)

2. Swap with a 1TB SATA SSD (for approximately $0)

3. Make my own M.2 NVMe to SATAExpress adapter board

I think we all know where this is going…

Thermite Be Giants 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

the yak demands shaving

sortius 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

*waves at "nuke it from orbit" sign*

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

The major problem with option 3 is finding the connector. Your challenge, #electronics Fedi hivemind, is to find me a SATAExpress drive-end connector I can buy

#electronics

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

Ohhhhhhhh fuck, I just realised I could possibly, maybe, make it a PCIe 3.0 x1 instead of x2 just by using a “normal” drive connector

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

… wait a fucken minute! Is that just a standard dual-port SAS connector?!

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

It is not: there is a slot in the key, which mates to a counter-key on the host side. I could cut that slot out of a standard SAS connector myself I guess?

sortius 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

I always get scared when hardware engineers start tinkering with actual computer hardware 😝

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

Also, the REFCLK pins aren’t on a SAS connector (E1 to E3). Technically they aren’t required…

Daniel Carosone 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

is that the sound of a dremel I hear?

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

@uep eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

@Daniel Carosone

systemd-jaded 3 months ago • mastodon (AP)

maybe you can rework one off of a scrap drive? i hope they are worthless on EBay.

J (he/him) 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🦘 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

😢

Adam Kent 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

Interesting alternative here, aes-256-ctr might be even faster? Would be fun to test. https://superuser.com/a/793003

Creating a large file of random bytes quickly

I want to create a large file ~10G filled with zeros and random values. I have tried using: dd if=/dev/urandom of=10Gfile bs=5G count=10 it creates a file of about 2Gb and exits with a exit statu...

^{Super User}

Joel Michael 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

@akent the trick is to use a hardware-accelerated cipher, which AES-128-CBC almost universally is

@Adam Kent

Adam Kent 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

Aaah very cool

abortretryfail 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

bsdtar

Comrade elronxenu 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

The code would have been rewritten multiple times since then.

I found IRQ handling errors in the Linux 1.x days; my fix was too messy to go in the kernel; everything has since been rewritten.

Brian :tokyo: 4 months ago • mastodon (AP)

@arichtman Wow that’s a spicy one.

@Ari-hell, Count Starts-from-2

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