Tuesday, April 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 April 2021

New New New New New New York Edition

Top Story

  • After being gone for nearly two weeks, our main server was back on line for only two days before another storm caused another power outage and took it down again.

    They've evidently got backup power working again for part of the datacenter, because the servers we have there for my day job didn't even hiccup, but our server was down for about five hours.

    And the switch it was attached to was down for about eight, so I couldn't reach it even after it came back on line.  When I was finally able to connect it had already been up for hours.

    Long story short, we're getting a second main server, in Dallas, close to this one. Specs are:

    • Intel W-1290P - 10 cores, 5.3GHz
    • 64GB RAM
    • 1TB + 2TB NVMe drives (it was a special deal, and adding a 2TB drive cost the same as upgrading the main drive to 2TB)

    Similar CPU performance, memory, and storage to our existing main server.  About 20% faster single-threaded but only nominally faster multi-threaded, despite having ten cores to the current server's eight.  At full load it throttles pretty hard.

    On the other hand, it's a lot faster than this server.  Thanks to the recycling of part numbers, we're upgrading from a Xeon 1240 to a Xeon 1290 and getting 4x the performance.

    I could have got two six core, 32GB servers for the same price as one ten core, 64GB server.  But what I've learned this week is that it doesn't help having lots of small servers if all the work is landing on just one of them.

    Update: New datacenter is 2.5ms away from this one and transfer rates are about 40MBps on a test file.  And this server is kind of slow; it would probably be faster with a decent server at this end.

    Not as close as SSDNodes which is clearly located in the same building, but not bad.

    Update to the above update: Apparently they are in the same building.  It's just a very, very large building.  Well, and we must be exiting to the internet and coming back in, where the route to SSDNodes is staying local.

    Yet another update:

    processor: 19
    vendor_id: GenuineIntel
    cpu family: 6
    model: 165
    model name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) W-1290P CPU @ 3.70GHz
    stepping: 5
    microcode: 0xe0
    cpu MHz: 800.211
    cache size: 20480 KB




Back by popular demand.  By demand, anyway.  Well, someone asked for it.


Tech News

  • Fortunately before the main server went away again I spent all of Sunday wrestling with LXD backup schemes for large database-driven containers.  In the end I got something that looked like it would work, and copied the resulting files off to two other locations, but I didn't actually get to check it out.

    In theory, an LXD backup is a GZipped Tar archive of a snapshot of the server - the Linux / Unix world's equivalent of a Zip file.  But what is it really?  What do you see when you look inside that file?

    Turns out you see exactly what it should be in theory.  Maybe I'm getting cynical in my early middle age, but that came as a pleasant surprise.


  • A billion dollars in funding for two AI startups.  (AnandTech)

    So what are these companies doing that is actually useful?  Cameras that fix your terrible photos, okay, that's one thing.  Anything else?  Teslas that crash into things because the driver is sitting in the back seat eating pizza?  Netflix recommendations that are so utterly useless that I cancelled my account?


  • The Corsair One a200 is small, quiet, fast, and expensive.  (Tom's Hardware)

    It includes a Ryzen 5900X processor and an Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card, both high-end parts and very hard - and expensive - to find by themselves, with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD.  So while this $3799 system bears a substantial markup over list price for the components, it's not such a bad deal compared to the market price - if you can find the individual components at all.

    It's a mini-ITX system so expansion is pretty limited.  You can't actually add anything; you'd have to swap out the existing SSD or RAM for larger versions.  And if you think you might ever want to do that, you're much better off moving up to the $4199 model, which provides a Ryzen 5950X, the same RTX 3080, 64GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD.


  • Barking dogs, screaming babies, band practice, and now IoT devices.  (devRant)

    This guy's neighbours have so many IoT devices that they render WiFi unusable for everyone around them.


  • Sony will not be shutting down the online stores for PS3 and PS Vita games just yet.  (CNet)

    I think this comes as a response to the rising noise about "CBomb", the flaw that means if - rather, when - your CMOS battery expires and needs to be replaced, all your games including the ones you own on physical media become unplayable until you connect back to the PlayStation Network.  If Sony shuts down online support for your console, sooner or later it will simply become an expensive brick.

    They are still stopping new sales of games for the PlayStation Portable, but are retaining online support and will allow existing purchases to be re-downloaded.


Good Luck Trying to Get a New Yorker Out of a Rent-Controlled Apartment Video of the Day



The Joys of Apple Design Video of the Day


The MacBook Pro has four Thunderbolt ports, any of which can be used for charging, so that if one of them fails for any reason, you can just switch to another port and keep right on working.

LOL/JK.  If any of them fails, they all stop working.  Because fuck you, that's why.



Disclaimer: Offer void where prohibited by law.  Also where not prohibited by law.  Offer void.  Fuck the offer anyway.  Whose dumb idea was this?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:24 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 995 words, total size 8 kb.

1 I would like to think that your data center company has PR working overtime groveling in apology, offering discounts, and promising that responsible heads will roll. I mean, it's not like keeping servers running 24/7 is their primary offering as a business, or something.

Posted by: David Eastman at Wednesday, April 21 2021 02:28 AM (t/97R)

2 I would like to think that too.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 21 2021 08:58 AM (PiXy!)

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




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