Tuesday, March 30

Geek

Daily News Stuff 30 March 2021

Gone Fishing Edition

Tech News

  • Want an RTX 3060 but you accidentally built your computer in a shoebox?  Asus is here to help.  (Tom's Hardware)

    At 7"x5"x2" it should fit most cases, but it is two-and-a-half slots wide.


  • Mine Bitcoin on your Game Boy.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Only about 100 trillion times slower than dedicated hardware.


  • The database I repaired last night - this morning, really - has not yet failed again.  This is good.

    Update: It failed again.  Less good.  I realised that I'm initialising the replicas from live snapshots, so I'm doing it again from a snapshot after a clean shutdown.  it shouldn't break either way, but it does.

    Specifically it reports I/O errors, but there are no I/O errors being logged at the kernel or hardware level.  As in, zero, total, since the server was rebuilt after one of the SSDs failed entirely.


  • Pigz is your friend.  

    Pigz is a parallelised Gzip.  MongoDB can optionally gzip your backups, but it's one thread per table, so if 95% of your database is two large tables you'll be sitting there waiting forever while 126 of your 128 cores are basically idle.

    If you don't gzip the output directly but have ZFS configured to use gzip compression, it's automatically multi-threaded and much faster, but if you then transfer the backup across the network it transfers it uncompressed.

    Solution is to backup uncompressed - let ZFS do its thing, it's not hurting you - and then Pigz everything in the dump directory, data and scheme files alike.  It's much faster and the MongoDB import will read it all just fine.

    Someone has a script to do incremental backups in MongoDB which I should take a look at.

    I'm not sure why they don't support it directly; all the necessary infrastructure is there as long as you run the incremental backup before the oplog flushes.  You can even do overlapping incremental backups, so you can still restore if some of the incrementals are missing.

    Sure, snapshots are easier, but a snapshot of a database with a corrupted index is just going to give you heartburn when you restore it.


  • Nobody thought to specify how to write IPv4 addresses until IPv6 arrived.  (Dave.tf)

    Since IPv4 had been around for a long time by then, the specification was based on existing practices, and existing practices were based on BSD. 

    Turns out that 0177.1 is a perfectly valid IP address.  If you read yesterday's post you can likely figure out what for.


  • There are 30 malicious images on Docker Hub that contain crypto mining code alongside or instead of what they are supposed to contain.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Which doesn't automatically mean disaster; there's a ton of stuff on Docker Hub.

    But those 30 images have been downloaded an aggregate 20 million times.


The Dark Queen Rises Video of the Day


10,000 people waiting in line with twenty minutes to go.

Update: She had to postpone it by half an hour, so now it's nearly 19,000 people waiting with twenty minutes to go.


Your Shark Is the Shark That Will Pierce the Heavens Video of the Day


Gura doesn't sound at all like an Iowa farm girl here, which is what I suspect she is.


Disclaimer: I have literally no idea what she's going to do.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:40 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 So... video cards haven't been useful for mining Bitcoin for most of a decade, as far as I know. 
The main author of Ethereum is working on a 2.0 version that's designed to move from proof of work to proof of stake, which would presumably mean less mining on video cards.
So what's causing all of this?

Posted by: Phil Fraering at Wednesday, March 31 2021 04:07 AM (pMvSF)

2 People are still mining Ethereum, as well as other crypto coins.  They will continue to mine Eth until the switchover, at least.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 31 2021 06:12 AM (eqaFC)

3 The "treat an IPv4 address as a single integer" thing is an old trick scammers/malware people used to use to hide their IP address, so I'd seen that one before. I'd seen the 192.1 variant but never knew what it was.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 31 2021 06:30 AM (eqaFC)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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