Music challenge: Kate Bush – Experiment IV – Official Music Video

I saw this for the first time on MTV (or something) back in the day and was blown away by the video. Kate Bush is great and this story-video feels like it is a bit forgotten. Appearances by Dawn French, Hugh Laurie and probably more famous people I don’t recognize.

Background
I was asked while ago by a friend to give some music tips. Problem was that I was not allowed to use Spotify or any other paid streaming service. So I picked some videos from YouTube and decided to post them here one video a day in no special order and without any written motivation (sometimes there is some short notes though). Enjoy if you want.

Find them all here: 100videos

Music challenge: Rammstein – Deutschland (Official Video)

Well, I could have made this very easy by adding all Rammstein videos since they are brilliant. But this one is even better than brilliant. Big production, great song!

Background
I was asked while ago by a friend to give some music tips. Problem was that I was not allowed to use Spotify or any other paid streaming service. So I picked some videos from YouTube and decided to post them here one video a day in no special order and without any written motivation (sometimes there is some short notes though). Enjoy if you want.

Find them all here: 100videos

Music challenge: Unity One – Infrared (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)

Electronic dance pop from Russia. No idea where I heard them first but I like the sound and have included this in my dj-set at the local pub more than once.

Background
I was asked while ago by a friend to give some music tips. Problem was that I was not allowed to use Spotify or any other paid streaming service. So I picked some videos from YouTube and decided to post them here one video a day in no special order and without any written motivation (sometimes there is some short notes though). Enjoy if you want.

Find them all here: 100videos

A fair warning: Seagate Exos X16 drives are noisy!

And that is an understatement. I recently replaced my very quiet (and old) WD Red 3TB drives with Samsung Exos X16 16TB drives. I’m starting to think this was a mistake as my storage server is in the living room. I wish I had somewhere else to keep the server but my apartment is not big enough.

I read somewhere on the internet (so yes, with a grain of salt but it sounds about correct) that the WD Reds are 28-29dB when active and the Exos X16s are 45 (!) dB. I realize that these Exos is enterprise class drives and probably not intended for home use and that in a server room there will be enough noise as it is to make this less of a problem.

Maybe I’ll have to replace them. Sad because I got them quite cheap and replacements will be significantly more expensive. Wonder if the Toshiba N300 drives are quieter because they seem to be a good alternative.

Music challenge: Apoptygma Berzerk – Moment of Tranquility (APOP vs. Twin Peaks)

Been a fan of Apoptygma Berzerk since I heard “Burning Heretic” back in the 1990s and mix it with Twin peaks which is the best tv-show ever and it’s a perfect match for me.

Background
I was asked while ago by a friend to give some music tips. Problem was that I was not allowed to use Spotify or any other paid streaming service. So I picked some videos from YouTube and decided to post them here one video a day in no special order and without any written motivation (sometimes there is some short notes though). Enjoy if you want.

Find them all here: 100videos

Netdata warns about packets dropped ratio

After my recent re-install of my fileserver I decided to make use of the Netdata monitoring (https://www.netdata.cloud). It is simple and requires very little configuration which suits me perfectly at the moment. But to my surprise it started to throw warnings at me from the start. Strange as my server is just installed and doesn’t have many service nor traffic to speak of, just a bunch of disks and NFS/CIFS shares.

One that caught my eye was Interface Drops (net_drops.enp3s0) which sounded like there was something wrong with the network interface or the local network:

screenshot from Netdatas notification list

A quick look at ifconfig confirms that there is packet drop on the interface. Not a large amount but enough to trigger the warning in Netdata.

# ifconfig enp3s0
enp3s0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.0.6  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.0.255
        inet6 fe80::62a4:4cff:feb1:b0d5  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether 60:a4:4c:b1:b0:d5  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 13150808  bytes 5182069895 (4.8 GiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 2874  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 12350768  bytes 15847850867 (14.7 GiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

But at the same time ethtool didn’t report these packages at all.

# ethtool -S enp3s0
NIC statistics:
     tx_packets: 12350894
     rx_packets: 13151278
     tx_errors: 0
     rx_errors: 0
     rx_missed: 2
     align_errors: 0
     tx_single_collisions: 0
     tx_multi_collisions: 0
     unicast: 12879297
     broadcast: 40489
     multicast: 231492
     tx_aborted: 0
     tx_underrun: 0

Odd. This is on my local network and the server is not exposed to internet so the source of those packets should be local. While I do have quite a few devices on my home network none of them should as far as I know send out unknown traffic that will get dropped just like that.

Looking at the graph I could easily see that the drops where very regular. Every 30 second there was a packet dropped.

screenshot of the graph Interface Drops

Time to look at the interface with tcpdump and see if there is any obvious offenders that appear every 30 seconds. And behold, after some fancy filtering to remove familiar, unsuspicious, traffic this line regularly came up every 30 second:

17:53:24.402973 LLDP, length 85: UniFiSwitch

Interesting. So my Ubiquity UniFi switch (a US-8) is using LLDP, Link Layer Discovery Protocol (wikipedia), to advertise its existence on the local network. This is what gets dropped regularly as my server doesn’t understand it and thus triggering the warning in Netdata.

To solve this I decided to make my server aware of LLDP by installing the lldpd package. This version of LLDP doesn’t require and specific configuration. It “just works”.

  # apt-get install lldpd
  # systemctl enable lldpd
  # service lldpd start

And within just a few minutes the warning in Netdata disappeared. Good times.

Since this was on a newly installed server with not that much traffic on the interfaces it was easy to catch. Had I started up all services these packets would have made up such a low ratio that they probably wouldn’t have triggered a warning.

Home storage refresh

Back on my old blog that I had 10 years ago (yes. it seems like forever ago and it probably is) I did write about building my homelab setup. At that time I used a HP Microserver NL54 (AMD Turion II based dual core) as both VMWare ESXi and ZFS storage. Needless to say that wasn’t and ideal setup in the long run but before hardware started to be limiting the hard drives started to fail. WD Greens will never again be used for anything by me.

So in 2013 I decided that I needed to solve my storage needs first so I built a ZFS NAS from scratch. I required a physically small setup since I don’t really have room for big noisy servers at home at the moment. The result was a small mini-ITX based Debian server with a Intel Pentium G2030 CPU (not at all powerful but can run linux + zfs without problems), 16GB of RAM, a Supermicro SATA controller card (2×4 SATA ports), 2 SSD (one for system and one as SLOG) and 6 WD Red 3TB disks in ZRAID2. All this in a case that is 25cm x 30 cm x 20cm. Brilliant!

Since then I have got rid of the Microserver and replaced some services with Raspberry Pies (PiHole and Unifi controller) and moved some VMs to VMWare Fusion on my primary computer (iMac Retina 27″).

Now it is 2021, the second year of the plague, and my fingers are finally itching to do some system work again. The fact that one of the WD Red drives had errors and kept going offline at times after a pretty decent 7 years of power on time was the decisive factor to do something about this (and that I was running out of space was another). Time to get to work!

Wishlist

So what do I want from a new setup?

  • It must fit in the same size case as that is all the space I have in the cupboard
  • It must have more storage space, preferably at least +50% more usable space
  • It would be nice to have a more powerful CPU so it can run a few VMs or Docker containers
  • It would be nice if it could work as a backup target for my iMac (Time Machine)
  • If possible re-use as much of the old setup to save money

That doesn’t sound that hard does it? It turns out it wasn’t.

What I got

I started off getting some new disks. Two 16TB Seagate EXOS X16 disks to replace the six 3TB WD Reds. Going from ZRAID2 to a simple mirror should also increase the performance quite a bit.

From Tradera (the swedish version of eBay) I managed to get a Intel i5 3550 CPU for 18 Euros. It will fit the current motherboard while giving some more oompf and two more cores.

In order to be able to reinstall the system without trashing the old one (having a rollback option can be very handy, I know this after 25 years in IT) I got a Samsung EVO 870 SSD to be the new system disk.

With this I figured I could get by quite nicely.

Then I thought “if I’m going to work in this small case I may as well do as much as possible at the same time” so I bought two Toshiba N300 8TB disks for a second mirror pair because they were on sale.

Going from 18TB raw disk to 48TB would at least be a significant upgrade. And as it goes from 6 disks to 4 disks I will have two free spots in the HDD cage for easy future expansion if needed. Nice.

Next

Waiting for all the parts to arrive, figuring out what I parts missed to buy and then disassemble the old system and rebuild it a new one. I’ll write about that next.

Music challenge: Ghost B.C. – “Year Zero” (Live at Webster Hall, NYC)

Had listened to Ghost before but when they performed at a local amusement park is really started to enjoy them even more for having a large crowd of mostly families chant “hail satan!” in unison as darkness fell.

Background
I was asked while ago by a friend to give some music tips. Problem was that I was not allowed to use Spotify or any other paid streaming service. So I picked some videos from YouTube and decided to post them here one video a day in no special order and without any written motivation (sometimes there is some short notes though). Enjoy if you want.

Find them all here: 100videos

Hello world …again

So I decided not to continue on my previous blog which has been stale since 2013 (2011 really) but instead start a new one and keep the old one as it is for archival purposes. Let us see where this takes me.

Note: this is 99% for my own sake as I seem to need somewhere tp act as a place where i can write things that will server as my “external” memory sometimes 😉