• If you want to use your new (I use the term loosely) Synology storage array as the home for your active BitTorrent downloads, you need to do two things. Or do one thing and avoid doing another:
  
  
• Create a separate shared folder
• Do not enable checksums
  
  
Checksums protect your static files from unwanted changes.  If you enable checksums on files that are updated constantly in little pieces - which is the way BitTorrent do - the checksums quickly overwhelm the CPU in your Synology thingy.

Which is not overly fast at the best of times.  (CPUBenchmark.net)

The 2012 model I have uses an Atom D2700, which scores 822 on PassMark.  The current model (2019) has a quad-core Atom C3538, which manages 2455.  Which is almost as much as a single core on the Ryzen 4800H laptop APU.  (I couldn't find a PassMark score for the 4800U just yet.)

By way of comparison, here's Intel's 2011 3960X and AMD's 2019 3960X.  Those are rather faster.  And use rather more power, which is why I was looking for the 4800U, which has a comparable TDP to the Atoms.

Also, the model I have only has 1GB RAM.  Works fine for storing static files - I get 100MB per second consistently.  Works fine for BitTorrent once I turned checksums off.  But I wouldn't want to use one of these as a Linux server.

Even though that's what they are.

• A nice feature of Synology's DSM is the Storage Analyzer, which tells you, for example, the you have five copies of the exact same 15GB file and you could maybe consider removing one or two.
  
  There's no automated deduplication feature, but from my experience with ZFS I can understand that.  (Synology uses Btrfs but the principles are the same.)  Running deduplication on ZFS with a large volume size and a small server murders disk performance - reducing it by as much as 80%. 
  
  The usual recommendation is 1GB of RAM for every TB of storage, just for the deduplication hashes.  My Synology units fall short of that by a factor of 16.  And as I might have mentioned, they aren't all that fast to begin with.
  
  
  
• Another nice feature is that you can set a snapshot schedule per shared folder, so that you can, for example, have all your working files backed up every hour and all the hourly backups kept for ten days.
  
  Not that I had a problem after rebooting my PC today that might have required such a thing.  No.
  
  
  
• Woolworths seem to have sorted out their online grocery ordering, after they were dropped in the poo first by the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague, and then by their only competitor stopping grocery deliveries entirely.  They've changed the time windows and extended the delivery hours - which now extend from 4AM to 10PM. 
  
  But everything is available, with the exception of benzalkonium chloride based disinfectants (bleach is available in a hundred varieties), disposable gloves (reusable rubber gloves are in stock), and gluten-free brioche.  But that last is just the distribution center that handles deliveries, my local store had plenty.
  
  
  
• Creating a SQL database in Go.
  
  Right when you are expecting the article to wrap up with "that's it for part one, in part two we will..." instead there's a working SQL database.  Well, sort of.  It doesn't do anything complicated like actually writing your data to disk, but it does let you create tables and insert and query data.
  
  
  
• The HPE 620QSFP28 is a network card that can be found for $100 second hand.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It has - no surprise given the model number - a single QSFP28 port.  That can be configured as anything from four 10GbE or 25GbE ports, to two 40GbE or 50GbE, to a single 100GbE.  Assuming you have the appropriate cable.
  
  Also, if you plug it into a server that is not made by HP, it might not boot ever again.  Or at least until you pull the card back out and clear the CMOS.  Whichever comes first.
  
  My Twitter suspension is over tomorrow.  Let's see how long that lasts...
  
  
  
• We've removed your privacy options, because fuck you that's why.  (EFF)
  
  I think I grabbed a screenshot when Twitter coughed this up a couple of days ago, but the EFF article has all the details anyway.  Essentially, protecting users' privacy was costing Twitter money, so they stopped doing that.
  
  
  
• The new Mac Mini is so compact and upgradable!  (9to5Mac)
  
  Sure.  It's four times the size of a NUC and the storage is soldered in place.  Wonderful.
  
  But it does have an option for 10GbE, which is not something I have seen on the PC side of things, and four Thunderbolt 3 ports.
  
  
  
• Performance fixes are being pushed into ZFS ahead of the release of Ubuntu 20.04 next week.  (Phoronix)
  
  That's cutting things a bit close.
  
  20.04 is a long-term support (LTS) release that will receive updates for five years.  But the important one is 20.04.1, which should land in July.  Until then, don't install this on anything you plan to put into production.
  
  I'm in this boat because I needed a very recent kernel to support the new Threadripper servers at work, but loading Ubuntu's updated kernel onto 18.04 broke ZFS.  So I'm running 19.10 right now, which ends support in July, right about when 20.04.1 should land.  And then I get to do rolling upgrades of the entire cluster.
  
  Fortunately, the way things have worked out I have a spare server in the new cluster.
  
  Phase 3 of our migration became Phase 2, and Phase 2 has been moved to "when we get to it" because we were able to arrange a price reduction on the existing servers.  So come July I have one server I can break, or even reinstall from scratch, without needing to migrate VMs and without our users noticing anything.

The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 14 2020 02:16 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 14 2020 02:40 AM (Iwkd4)

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