Tech News

• Terabytes of data are trucking about happily both at home and at work.
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, I need 10Gb Ethernet.
  
  
  
• Yes, we have that for all the new servers at work, but the public internet connection is still 1Gb and is the bottleneck right now.
  
  But then, that's all we have on the old servers, so upgrading it on the other end wouldn't help a whole lot.
  
  
  
• Ooh, these things support snapshots per shared folder.  So if I have another accident like I did with Dropbox I can just click a button and restore it all.
  
  Having it per folder is great because some of them will have a lot of churn and others will be static, or just grow steadily.  Snapshots take up no extra room if all you're doing is adding files.  But if you do decide to delete files you'll find that you don't get any disk space back...
  
  
  
• Here's a USB 2.5GbE adaptor getting put through its paces.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Seems to work as advertised.  And the Synology units each have dual 1GbE ports with channel bonding.
  
  Only problem then is an extreme shortage of 2.5GbE switches at PixyLab.
  
  
  
• Another review of the Asus G14 and its Ryzen 9 4900HS.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's Ian Cutress at AnandTech, though, so it's worth reading if you're interested in either this laptop or the chip that powers it.
  
  
  
• Putting Linux to work on the Asus G14.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It, um, did not go terribly well.  The problem is the dual graphics (IGP and Nvidia) aren't properly supported and you end up with the battery life of dedicated graphics and the graphics acceleration of no graphics at all - 2FPS in DOTA2 at the menu.
  
  If you're looking for a Linux laptop, this is probably not the safest bet right now.
  
  
  
• IBM is theatening free COBOL training.  (Input)
  
  Offering.  Offering free COBOL training.  Yes, that's what I meant.
  
  
  
• China's Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-U6780A gets reviewed.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a joint venture between Via and the Shanghai Municipal Government.  It's an 8 core 64-bit x86 CPU, built on a 16nm process.
  
  It has integrated graphics, but it gets absolutely creamed by a Core i5 7400, so the less said about that the better.
  
  With all eight cores going, it outruns an Athlon 220GE - a dual-core Ryzen APU - by about 8%, while using only 150% more power.
  
  On the other hand, the article presents a long list of benchmarks that the chip runs succesfully - which means that it works and is compatible with Intel and AMD, which is a signficant feat even if performance is basically meh.
  
  And it probably gets more FPS than an Asus Zephyrus G14 runing DOTA2 on Ubuntu 20.04.
  
  
  

• Those Synology units that landed rather abruptly on my doorstep a week ago are now up and running.  16TB of effective RAID-5 or 6 storage each, updated all the way to DSM 6.2.2.  
  
  Two of the arrays had failed drives and ended up in RAID-5, but I have a couple of spares and may fix that before I start actually using them.
  
  They're not a particularly powerful model - dual core Atom CPUs and 1GB RAM - but for file storage that will mostly be accessed over WiFi that's not a problem.
  
  Only remaining problem is that it will take a week or so to copy all my data across.
  
  
  
• Here's something that might help there: 800 Gigabit Ethernet.  (AnandTech)
  
  That would cut it down from a week to about ten minutes, yes.  I'm not sure what an 800 Gb network card would plug into, though; that needs PCIe 6.0 levels of bandwidth.
  
  Interesting note in the article is that a 16-port 400GbE switch from Cisco costs around $11,000.  That's not a lot for that much bandwidth, really.  That's a core switch for hundreds of servers on 10GbE, which would collectively cost a large multiple of $11,000.
  
  
  
• Micron has introduced QLC flash into the place it least belongs: The datacenter.  Unless they haven't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Basically, these are targeted at high performance hard disks - the 10K and 15K RPM models that some people are still clinging to.  A drop-in replacement can deliver two orders of magnitude better random read performance.
  
  A random I/O workload that could run on a disk drive at all isn't enough to wear out a modern SSD, not even QLC, so this is probably safe.
  
  
  
• That seems to be about it.  All quiet on the Western Front.  And all the other fronts.
  
  
  

1 "I'm not sure what an 800 Gb network card would plug into, though; that needs PCIe 6.0 levels of bandwidth."
Epyc board(s) with a 5-slot bridge.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 10 2020 11:14 PM (Iwkd4)

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• Got Threadripper servers #2 and #3 deployed today.  Working names are Alvin, Simon, and Theodore.
  
  This weekend will be a clusterfest - LXD, GlusterFS, Percona XtraDB, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ.  Plus a new Ethereum node, PostgreSQL, GitLab, Traefik, and Minio.
  
  
  
• Also got a delivery slot before the toilet paper went out stock again.  It's for Sunday, which is sooner than I need, but I'll take it.  (Some other items went out of stock while I was clicking refresh, including the very nice gluten free brioche, but I'll live.)
  
  
  
• You are seeking a technological solution to a social problem.  (TechDirt)
• 
  Stop it.
  
  
  
• Yeah, great, private Facebook groups are noted for their strict HIPAA compliance.  (TechDirt)
  
  
  
• Australia's NBN is looking at millimetre wavelengths for fixed wireless internet.  (ZDNet)
  
  This range - from around 25 to 30 GHz - is unattractive to for mobile phones but offers a lot of potential for things that don't move around quite so much.  If all the bandwidth is allocated for a given area, aggregate transfer speeds would exceed 100Gbps.  This makes it far superior to satellite for providing broadband internet to the home in semi-rural areas.
  
  
  
• Google has made Stadia free for the next two months.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  This will delay Stadia's inevitable demise by at least a week.
  
  
  
• Windows file explorer is getting WSL integration.  (The Verge)
  
  Good.  When I need that I tend to create folders the Windows side recognises and then symlink them into the WSL environment.  That works seamlessly.  The other direction.... Not so much.

Tweet of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 10 2020 01:02 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 10 2020 01:25 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 10 2020 05:19 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, April 10 2020 09:03 AM (LMsTt)

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Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 09 2020 01:37 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, April 11 2020 05:21 AM (cTMj+)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 11 2020 06:33 AM (Iwkd4)

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• I downloaded Nim and installed it on WSL and compiled a trivial test application and...  It worked.  Completely painless.  Compiles in roughly a second, most of which is spent loading the compiler because WSL is kind of slow at initialising binaries.
  
  The compiled size for a trivial app that just reads some text from the user and responds is 90K.  75K stripped, 41K upxed.  (upxed binaries don't work on WSL1 though.)
  
  That's pretty acceptable; I'll rewrite my Crystal system monitoring agent in Nim and see how it goes with a simple real-world app (it needs, for example, HTTPS support).  On advantage I'm hoping to see from the C back-end is a smarter linker than Crystal has.
  
  The problem with using either one seriously at my day job is the state of the MongoDB drivers, since we have many terabytes of MongoDB databases we aren't about to migrate.
  
  Both come with MySQL and PostgreSQL drivers, and Elasticsearch is a REST API and therefore not a problem, but we need solid MongoDB support.
  
  Update: With the HTTPClient and SSL libraries pulled in - and working, since I had it actually download this page - the binary is 287K in full or 97K stripped and upxed.  That is entirely acceptable.  It's an order of magnitude smaller than the Crystal equivalent.
  
  Update Two: Wait, is that really a static binary? My usual test is to drop it on a horribly out-of-date Linux box and see if it still works, but I just turned off all of those.
  
  The documentation suggests that Nim builds static libraries by default, but that's awfully small if it's really pulled in OpenSSL.  I suspect that it might be "static except for OpenSSL" or some such nonsense.  But then, that's pretty much what Crystal does on Mac.
  
  
  
• Replace the innards of your Gamecube with a Ryzen 3200G-based Gamecube emulator.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because why not?
  
  
  
• So in what sense is OpenVMS open?  (Legacy OS)
  
  The final hobbyist licenses for OpenVMS will expire at the end of 2021.
  
  
  
• A look at the Xeon 5220R.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Wait, didn't we just do that one?  Oh, that was the 6226R?  Okay.
  
  This is a 24 core Xeon at a sharply reduced price compared to last year, as Intel struggles to find a way to compete with AMD.  And mostly fails, to be brutally honest.  It's beaten soundly by the 24 core Epyc 7402, and in many cases, by the 16 core Epyc 7302.
  
  Where the 6-series supports up to four sockets, the 5-series only supports the more common two.  Although the 6226R also only supports two sockets, so there's not a huge difference here.
  
  In short, it's a much more cost-effective chip from Intel if you're stuck with Intel.  If you're not stuck with Intel and don't need a ton of RAM per sever, there are faster better cheaper options.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 09 2020 01:05 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 09 2020 02:01 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 09 2020 03:45 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 09 2020 04:20 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 09 2020 09:36 AM (PiXy!)

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Posted by: GreyDuck at Wednesday, April 08 2020 02:43 AM (rKFiU)

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• We have two more Threadripper servers being configured at my day job. 
  
  I'm going to set them all up as an LXD 4.0 cluster.  We're probably going to need Docker, which is not exactly best friends with LXD, but with LXD 4.0 I can run a full virtual machine and then run Docker inside that.
  
  72 cores at up to 4.5GHz, 384GB RAM, 45TB of enterprise MLC NVMe SSD, and 48TB of spinning rust across three servers.
  
  I could have gone for the 3970X, but I don't think we need those extra cores, and the price difference will pay for a nice little dev server - probably a Xeon 2276.
  
  
  
• Yes, we don't like Fox News.  No, that doesn't mean this lawsuit against them is anything more than goat vomit.  (TechDirt)
  
  This is why TechDirt remains sort of worth reading.  On the third hand, they note:

  The San Diego article has quite the interview with Arthur West, who runs WASHLITE, and it feels like every word he said is designed to troll Ken "Popehat" White

  Which seems laudable to me.
  
  
  
• The most 2020 headline ever.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
• The stupid you will have with you always.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  In this case it's almost certainly moderately stupid grifters shaking down the truly stupid, but the result is the same.
  
  
  
• This video will die in 100 days.
  
  
  
  
  
• AMD, could you release another CPU please?  The last one gave me content for days.
  
  
  
• Crystal 0.34 is out.  (Crystal-Lang)
  
  Not a lot of language changes; things are getting more stable as they approach 1.0.  They have tidied up some features so that, for example, a case statement will detect whether you are checking all the possible values and refuse to compile if not.  You can include an else condition as a catch-all, but you have to do that explicitly.
  
  I like Crystal, and I like the direction it's headed in.  I need to catch up on Nim as well and see where that is, because I'd like to be able to deploy to Windows and Crystal won't be there for a while yet.
  
  
  
• Mochizuki's inter-universal Teichmüller proof has been published.  (Phys.org)
  
  Mathematicians are still debating whether it actually is a proof, and Mochizuki and Teichmüller themselves aren't being terribly helpful.
  
  This - if it is validated - would prove the abc conjecture, which would in turn prove a whole bunch of stuff, including a much simpler proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.  (Which has been proven, but is fiendishly complicated.)
  
  
  
• The hot new game for 2020 is finding a time when your supermarket both has toilet paper in stock and has delivery slots open.
  
  Right now it's a but not b.  Earlier it was b but not a.
  
  I went out yesterday - I needed to resupply on antihistamines, because if my allergies started playing up and I was sneezing all the time I wouldn't be able to go out in public - and not only was the toilet paper aisle empty, the toilet paper aisle was gone.  
  
  Lots and lots of nappies where it would have normally been.  If you're a tiny baby - or elderly and infirm, I suppose - you can continue pooping on your regular schedule.
  
  I have groceries arriving tomorrow morning between 4 AM and 9 AM, which is a time slot that didn't exist in pre-apocalypse days, though the ETA is between 6:50 and 7:50 which is not entirely insane.  If I get what I ordered or some reasonable facsimile I'll be good for three weeks.
  
  Food I already have.  There's no shortage of food.  Food is goddamn everywhere.
  
  Except somehow Easter eggs, but I bought some yesterday so that's okay.
  
  

Not Exactly Tech News

• Then he opened the thirty-second seal, and behold, Berserk resumed serialisation.  (Reddit)
  
  How many signs do you need for one apocalypse?
  
  
  
• Novartis is starting phase 3 trials of ruxolitinib to treat severe Corona-Chan.  (Novartis)
  
  This is a treatment for cytokine storms, which are believed to have been a major killer during the 1918 Flu Pandemic - the reason it killed so many young and otherwise healthy people.  I'm not sure how common that is in WBSDP, but it's a good drug to add to the toolbox - if it works.
  
  Also, ruxolitinib is binitiloxur backwards.
  
  

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 08 2020 01:40 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 08 2020 01:58 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 08 2020 01:59 AM (Iwkd4)

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